Authors: Belinda Pollard
He nodded, slowly, obviously thinking. “We’ll need more on that, but later will do. What about the others?”
She looked back at the door, her eyes moving to the images circling Liana—a collection of photos cut from nature magazines, and a faded print of a young boy blowing out candles on a cake, a smiling man and woman behind him. She gestured in a circular motion. “Those are Bryan’s parents, but I guess you know that.”
He nodded. “I thought so.”
Her gaze now moved down the door. Eight photos cut into perfect squares, aligned into two rows—four men across the top, four women across the bottom. She gasped and her hand went to her throat as she saw Rachel. A heavy black cross had been drawn across the photo with marker pen, going from corner to corner with mathematical precision, just as with the other seven images. Transfixed, it took a moment for Ellen to speak. She drew a deep breath and fought the desire to scream. She swallowed hard. “That’s my daughter. Second from the left.” She looked at Peter, frowning. “I’ve never seen that photo before, and it’s recent—she’s only had that hairstyle this year. I wonder where he got it. We live in the same house and she’s always enjoyed showing me her photos.”
He spoke calmly. “Except for the shot of Bryan, they’re all taken with a long lens. We think they’re probably surveillance photos.”
“But why...? I don’t understand.” She shook her head. But she did understand. At least enough to know that she was looking at the product of a very disturbed mind.
“Would you like a drink of water?” Peter’s hands were still relaxed, the heat of his upper arm still near enough to hers to give support without professional impropriety.
“No, let’s get this done and get out of this place.” She shivered and wrapped her arms around herself, one hand each side of her waist. One by one she identified the other photographs. They were older now, but still recognizable as Rachel’s high school friends. “And I guess that must be Bryan. He looks so different with that hair. I wouldn’t have recognized him in the street.”
“Thank you, Ellen.” He stood and closed the cupboard door, hiding its images—although they remained burnt on her retinas. “Let’s get you out of here.”
He reached for her elbow and helped her to her feet, maintaining the hold as they walked back down the hallway. She was glad of the human touch, and the physical support—her legs felt rubbery, her throat dry. It was a visceral relief to emerge into the sunshine again, and gulp fresh air as Peter locked the house’s horrors within it.
29
Callie struggled up from deep inside the earth. It was warm and dark down there, and she wanted to curl into the fetal position till the end of the world, but for some reason she wasn’t to be allowed to do so. Up. She had to come up. There was a murmur of voices, and someone was flicking her face. Something cold. Water. They were flicking her face with water.
She opened her eyes a crack, and the vicious light pierced her brain like a rapier. Callie instinctively turned from it, and at the movement her head exploded with pain.
“Callie! Are you okay?” That was Jack’s voice.
“Stop flicking me,” she muttered. Or she thought she said it. So hard to be sure if her tongue had actually shaped any sounds.
“Callie! Can you hear us?” That wasn’t Jack. A woman. Rachel? Yes, she sounded odd, but it must be Rachel.
Callie cracked her eyes open again, and looked up towards that horrible light. Three shapes. She closed her eyes, and tried to pull her thoughts back from the corners of the universe where they had fled. A slapping noise. Slap, sla-slap. Rain. They weren’t flicking her.
“It’s raining.”
“Yes, sweetie, it’s raining, but not nearly as bad as before.” That was Rachel again. She sounded anxious.
I wonder what’s happened to make her anxious?
“Callie, can you open your eyes?” Someone else. Callie’s mind roamed around awkwardly, then settled on an answer. Erica, and she was wearing her professional voice.
Why?
“Callie, you need to open your eyes and talk to us.” Erica again, and quite bossy this time. “Callie! Open your eyes!”
“Bossy-boots.”
A short gust of laughter. That was Jack.
“What did she say?” Erica again.
“She called you a bossy-boots. That has to mean she’s still in there somewhere.”
“Come on, sweetie.” Rachel’s voice again. “See if you can open your eyes for us. I know it’s hard, but you just have to do it. Please Callie.”
Something in the timbre of Rachel’s voice pierced the fog. Anxiety, insistence, pleading. Callie struggled to raise her eyelids, so thick and heavy. This time the light didn’t hurt quite so much. The shapes around her took form. Jack beside her in the tent, Erica and Rachel crouched awkwardly in the opening, rain spattering through the gaps between them.
“Well, hello there.” Rachel was smiling at her, but her eyes looked teary. Or was it just the rain moistening her face?
“Can you move, Callie?” asked Erica. “Just see if you can roll onto your side for me.”
Not for you
,
but I might give it a crack for Rachel
. Laboriously, she began to move, and the pain radiated out from her head and started grabbing her limbs, now a shoulder, there a knee. Even her hand and wrist didn’t like it. She moaned. “Why does it hurt so much?”
She must have said that one clearly enough, because Jack replied. “You’ve been through a blender, love. Keep going. You’re doing well.”
Eternal minutes later, they had Callie more or less sitting upright in the cramped tent. They’d tried to explain the landslide, and her tumble down the mountain, but her brain didn’t want to absorb the information. Jack had moved out into the rain to let Erica in to tend to Callie’s head wound from her mini first aid kit. The disinfectant applied from Erica’s small, precious bottle felt like razors slicing into Callie’s scalp, and she gasped with the agony of it, her eyes wet.
While Erica worked, Callie gazed thick-headedly at the puzzling clutter down the end of the tent. Her eyes seemed to have forgotten how to focus. Finally, the orange mound resolved itself into her wet-weather gear, the jacket slung, arms akimbo, over her rucksack. Jack’s gear was down there too, except for his blue rain jacket, which must be on him. Filthy boots were mixed in among it.
Their sleeping bags had been set up side by side, each inside its big orange plastic waterproof bag, as required in this sort of weather, but they were lumpy, twisted and misshapen. The roof of the tent sagged lopsidedly, and there seemed to be almost as much mud inside as out. She puzzled over an oblong shape above her head, then realized it must be duct tape—Jack had repaired a tear. It looked like a camp set up by a blind and drunken madman. It was a far cry from the shipshape order enforced by Ranger Bryan from Day One of this march, and robotically perpetuated by his reluctant acolytes even after he was gone, for the simple reason that it worked.
Callie looked round for Jack. Rachel still crouched in the opening, watching her closely, but Jack must be standing up taking a look around. All she could see was his legs from the knee down, bare toes sticking out the bottom of his pants. So that’s why there were so many boots in the tent.
“Hey, Jack!” she called, and the sound resonating in her head only hurt a moderate amount.
The toes changed direction on the rock, the knees bent, and in a moment Jack was peering in at her, his concerned face aligned with Rachel’s. “What’s up?” he asked.
“I just wanted to say: I love what you’ve done with the place. Bryan would be so proud.”
His face split into a grin. “Oh shut up! You try doing any better in these conditions. It was like trying to wrestle an elephant in a car wash!”
“Who are you calling an elephant?” she demanded, and erupted into giggles. Jack joined in and then even Rachel started a little muffled snorting, her hand over her mouth as she looked with new eyes at the chaos inside the tent. Each shake of Callie’s body pounded her bruised ribcage and thumped inside her head, but it felt good in spite of all that.
Never underestimate the value of laughter.
It became one of those spells of uncontrolled laughter that sometimes happen among old friends who’ve been too tired and too stressed for too long—a moment of release.
As they grew calm again, Callie realized Erica had not joined in. She turned to look at her; lines of strain were showing on the other woman’s face. “What’s wrong?” Her heart leapt into her mouth as she realized Erica somehow might have diagnosed the severity of her injuries; though she could move and talk and even laugh right now, her life might yet be slipping away. She’d seen it before when covering road accidents: people talking to their rescuers, alive and breathing, but when she called the police later to follow up, she’d find out the person had died in the ambulance.
Callie saw a look pass between the other three, and Erica seemed close to tears. Her anxiety levels rose. Jackson sighed, and looked at the ground. He might have been formulating words, but it was Rachel who broke the silence. When she did, it took a moment for Callie to absorb that it wasn’t her they were concerned about.
“There was another landslide further along, Cal,” she said. “Up where we were walking. Much smaller and narrower than this one, but not good, just the same.”
Callie gave her a questioning look. “What happened?”
“Well, it’s just that…” Rachel shrugged helplessly, and looked at the other two for help. They were both looking somewhere else by now. Her eyes went back to Callie’s and her expression was gentle.
“Callie, we can’t find Adam or Kain.”
30
The voice down the phone line was as dry and sibilant as two pieces of paper rubbing together. It conjured up in Peter’s mind visions of a dusty old law office with high windows, and a hunched figure at a gloomy desk. It seemed perfectly appropriate that the man’s name was Dickens.
“I am not authorized to release Mr Smithton’s will until thirty days after his death has been formally declared.” There was no apology in the tone. The owner of the voice was smugly assured of his legally superior position.
Peter was working hard at holding down the edges of his temper. “I understand your situation, Mr Dickens. Are you able to confirm for me the date on which the most recent will was signed?” He looked at the document in his hand, arrived via Interpol so recently that the paper was still warm from their laser printer. A copy of a will that was catastrophically different to the older one found in Bryan’s house. A will found locked inside a safe at the home of Kain Vindico.
There was a moment’s silence while the lawyer considered Peter’s request. “The document we hold is dated the thirteenth of October this year.”
Peter inhaled sharply. “The thirteenth did you say? Not the third?”
“The thirteenth.”
“Mr Dickens, that will is relevant to an ongoing police investigation. It is imperative that we see the content of it.”
“Then I am very much afraid, sergeant, that you will have to get yourself a warrant.”
31
Callie wasn’t sure if her vision had been damaged, or if the mist really did keep pulling in and out of the trees as though it was doing a hula dance. The rain had eased, but the vegetation they pushed through was heavy with rainwater, and the ground so waterlogged that some sections were like quicksand. It sucked down on a boot, only letting go with huge reluctance and an angry slurping noise. Every step was painful already without that complication. Her rucksack seemed about ten kilograms heavier than it had this morning, even though the others had taken some of her load. Callie wondered, again, if she should have argued so hard.
She had been determined not to remain alone at the slapdash campsite, while the others went searching. Yes, she wanted to do her bit to help, but her display of team spirit had been cloaking a kernel of fear. What if the mountainside gave way again, with her on it, trapped inside the tent, with no way to escape, and no one to help? Tumbled downwards inside a giant cement mixer, and then slowly and inexorably flattened, trying to draw breath in the dark, with the weight of scrambled rainforest pressing down and down and down, and no one even to hold her hand while the last molecules of oxygen left her body.
Even worse, what if there was another slide between Callie and the searchers, and they couldn’t get back to her, and the afternoon drew on into evening and night and the next day, and she was the only person in the universe?
No, she couldn’t stay in the tent on the rock. She’d been even more mutinously determined when she saw the bossy look on Erica’s face. “You need to stay here,” Nurse had declared with complacent finality. “Sure, you don’t seem to have any broken arms or legs, which is great. But we have no accurate way to tell what your internal injuries might be, and I’d be very surprised if that head wound of yours hasn’t given you concussion. You need to rest.”
“You’re right. I also need a long hot bath. And a big plate of steak and chips. But they don’t seem to have a Holiday Inn out here, so I’ll just have to put all that on hold for another day.”
Rachel had wavered between the two points of view, but ultimately Jack had been the one to see the issues for what they were, and to state them with his customary candor.
“Whatever we do from here, we must stay together. We can’t risk getting separated again. It’s too dangerous.” He’d started ticking off a list on his fingers. “We also have to take our gear with us; we can’t risk getting separated from our tents or sleeping bags or cooking equipment by any further landslide or something else we haven’t thought of. We also can’t spend the night here—there’s not enough room for more tents on this rock, and I don’t trust its stability anyway, this close to the slip zone. It would be lovely to get back to last night’s rock bivvy, but we can’t because the mountain we hiked across earlier is in a big pile down there.” He’d indicated the foot of the landslip, and they’d all looked at it, and then above it at the sheer rock face it had revealed, too steep and too slippery for their meager rock-climbing skills.