Authors: Belinda Pollard
Without the ungainly pack, it was a much easier journey back to the fear-paralyzed woman. Speaking softly, she persuaded Erica to keep her eyes shut while she unclipped her harness and eased the rucksack from her shoulders, reaching around to wedge it as firmly as she could into the angle of the ledge. And then she just hugged her for a minute, pressed close to the cliff face, while Erica clung and wept.
At last, Callie was able to make eye contact with Jack, about two meters further back. He was crouched on the ledge facing her, Rachel hunched in front of him, and he had his arms around her in a hug—for comfort or to keep her from falling, or both. He held Callie’s gaze for a long moment, and then another and another. His face was wet with tears.
The trip back along the ledge was slow and laborious, Callie murmuring coaxing words to Erica, insisting that she keep her eyes closed. That meant Callie had to watch the placement of each foot, so she stayed facing the other woman and moved backwards, shuffling her feet so she could feel the surface, incessantly looking over her own shoulder to check for bumps and dips.
At the end of the ledge, there was no option but for Erica to open her eyes, but before she’d allow her to do so, Callie gave strict instructions that she was only to look uphill, not downhill.
She left the trembling woman safely wrapped in a space blanket from her own rucksack, and went back for Erica’s pack. Then it was time to help Rachel and Jack. They formed a train, Rachel hanging onto Callie’s waist, and Jack steadying Rachel from behind.
As the four survivors crouched in a circle among those boulders, finding what windbreak they could, the relief to be alive and off that ledge was tangible. There was still maybe two hours walking if they planned to try for the alpine meadow tonight. And they had to deal with Kain yet. But that was a problem they could face soon enough.
And the mountain watched, silent, unyielding.
46
“Stand up, Thomas Granton, and face me like a man!” Peter turned to see Ellen Carpenter sweep into the crowded search room like a tornado. He, along with everyone else, froze in shock. “How dare you!” She was trembling with naked fury, and her eyes could have bored holes in concrete. “How
dare
you sit in this room and smile and nod and pretend to be helping, when all the while you’re trying to kill my little girl! Explain yourself.”
The vision before him reminded Peter of a childhood warning never to get between a vixen and her cubs, but he finally snapped out of it. Stupid to be scared of a woman in his own police station. “Ellen. Calm down and stop shouting. What seems to be the problem?”
“What seems to be the problem? This seems to be the problem.” She thrust a sheaf of papers towards him, and shook it. “We wondered who the new beneficiary was. Well, look at that.”
A passage was marked on the document, and he read it rapidly, disbelief growing with each word. He looked at his senior constable, now standing by the radio, arms crossed not in self-defense but in defiance. “Tom? What do you have to say about this?”
“I have nothing to say.” His voice was flat, toneless.
Ellen launched another attack, and for a moment Peter thought he might have to physically restrain her. “You better have something to say. What have you done? What have you done, to this search, to these families, to my little girl? You cold-blooded scumbag!”
Tom was stung into a reaction and he rounded on her, his hands clenched into fists by his side. “What about that other family that lost their little girl? Your daughter’s a grown woman who got away with murder for ten years. Well not any more. She’s getting what she deserves! They all are! And then
my
little girl who never hurt anyone might get a chance to live!”
Ellen hurled herself towards him and the search room descended into chaos.
47
“Jack, be careful, please.” He looked back over his shoulder. Callie had followed him towards that awful slope down to the lower ledge. It looked like the playground slide out of a horror movie, ending in hundreds of meters of empty air. Gusts of wind kept punching him, trying to carry him off the mountain. He felt the void drawing him like a magnet, and his blood pressure rose in anxiety, his breath coming fast. It was a relief to turn his back on the fearful view for a moment and face Callie. “I know you want to make sure Kain’s body is treated with respect,” she said, “and I agree that it’s important we do the best we can for him or we’ll go mad. But if it comes down to it, don’t risk your life. Please. Just leave him where he is if you have to. We need you.” Her eyes were intense, with just the slightest brightness of tears.
He closed the gap between them in two steps, and gathered her into a wordless hug for one, two, three seconds. And then he released her and turned back to the task. She was really crying now, but he couldn’t watch her do it.
Ten meters or so, not a huge drop. That was how Kain had described the distance between the upper and lower ledges. Not huge, but more than enough to kill a big strong man, his spine snapped, his head smashed.
Not huge
, Jack kept repeating in his head, as he carefully clambered down that steep, exposed slope with its perilous full-stop ending. When a particularly brutal gust whistled past him, pushing and shoving, he flattened himself against the mountain and clung until it passed.
Flooding, that’s what psychologists call it, when you do a whole heap of the thing that terrifies you, so you stop fearing it. He’d written an article on it once. About theories, and other people’s experiences, distant lives. But it wasn’t distant theory any more. Flooding was what he’d been doing all the way along that narrow ledge. Flooding was what he was doing now, and had done so many times on this expedition. Acrophobia: fear of heights. That was Jack’s poison.
As if what awaited him on the lower ledge wasn’t bad enough, without the added fear of the edge. He knew Callie would have helped him if she could, but though she said nothing, he could see there was pain in her shoulders by the way she’d been carrying herself since they’d left the ledge. Adrenalin had given her the strength to lever herself out of the jaws of the fall, but now her body was paying for it. She needed a rest. In a hospital bed, probably. But a wind-blown mountainside would have to do. Rachel was struggling, and Erica his fellow acrophobic—the team nurse who should have confirmed death for them, felt for a pulse, that sort of thing—was a basket case who simply couldn’t face any more flooding today. And so the task had fallen to Jack.
They’d agreed that Kain’s body should be covered against the elements if possible, and left on the ledge, as far from the edge as Jack could manhandle it. There was no way to get it back up that slope. And Jack, as “the Reverend”, would say some kind of prayer on everyone’s behalf, recording what he could on the camera that lay in his pocket. It would be a far cry from the send-off they’d given Sharon, which itself had seemed so inadequate at the time.
What an inappropriate person he was to be doing the “last offices” for this man. Tension had always been there between them, nurtured by Jack’s jealous anger that anyone could be loved by Callie and not value it. But it had flowered into naked enmity these last few days.
They’ll know you are Christians by your love, that’s what Jesus said. Yeah, Jack. Good one. Well done.
Self-hatred seared his soul as he grappled with the remains of Kain’s life. Unclipping the rucksack, dragging, pulling, heaving the corpse across that ledge, crossing arms on top, wrestling legs, torso into the big orange plastic sack they each carried for just such a time as this, tugging it up over the sightless staring eyes and tucking it in under the pulpy head. Giving tender care that he’d not shown him in life. Jack wept, loud and uninhibited, with only the sullen mountain and the angry wind to hear him.
Oh God. I’m so sorry
.
And then it was time to empty that rucksack. Suspicion had been so important just one hour, two hours ago. Who cared what was in it now? Emotion told him to kick it off the ledge into space, and never know whether Kain had the knife or not. But rationality said they needed the cooking equipment and other practical stuff, plus it would make sense to take the tent to replace the one damaged after the landslide.
So he moved that rucksack well away from the edge, and started sorting.
***
They stared at the items lying in the center of their little circle. Sheltered by the mass of an uphill boulder, they were merely slapped by the still-rising wind instead of pummeled.
No one spoke. Just stared. And tried to process what it meant.
The knife was one thing. They’d had their suspicions about Adam’s knife anyway. He could have just wanted that for protection. But the satellite phone, and the GPS. And those energy bars—three of them, lying in a neat row.
It was Jack who finally broke the silence. “He had the emergency beacon too. But it seemed to have been damaged in the fall. I tried to get it to activate, but I couldn’t get anything out of it. So I left it down there.” He suddenly felt unsure of that decision. “I could go back down and get it, if you want.” He looked from one face to another, hesitant. “In case one of you can get it to work.” Still no one looked at him; their eyes were locked on the emergency equipment.
The silence that followed stretched long and thin and tight. The stuff that could save their lives—could have saved Sharon and Adam and even Kain—was not on the bottom of Poison Bay with Bryan, but traveling beside them every day, sleeping beside them every night. Kain had it with him, all along, and hadn’t told them. Had food that he hadn’t shared. How could their spirits recover from a blow like this?
Finally, Rachel spoke. “Can we be certain that he knew he had them? That they weren’t hidden in his pack, by Bryan or someone else?” Her voice was flat, toneless, but her words were more articulate than they’d been since the plane missed them, hours earlier.
“They were wrapped inside his sleeping bag.” He felt like this needed an explanation. As though that was an odd place to look, a violation. “It seemed heavier than mine, that’s why I got it out and unrolled it.” Down there on that ledge, with the wind wrestling with him for control of the fabric. Right next to a corpse in a plastic bag.
Rachel nodded, her expression somber. “So, he knew.”
“Wrapped in the folds, or actually inside the sleeping bag?” Erica’s question had an alertness behind it.
“Actually inside the bag. Right down at the feet.”
“That accounts for how he hid them from me. He must have slept with them there.” She paused. “Even made love to me with them there.”
The euphemism for sex surprised Jack in such a context. He’d have expected harsh words. Profanity. But the look on Erica’s face wasn’t anger. Kain must have meant more to Erica than he realized. If that was the case, watching him die would have been especially horrific. Knowing that he was apparently willing to use her and then let her die, so much worse.
Callie must have noticed it too. She reached out and took Erica’s hand—a gesture Jack could never have imagined seeing between these two particular women even twenty-four hours ago. And Erica received it readily, actually squeezed the hand in acknowledgment.
“So,” said Callie, “do either of them work?”
“I couldn’t get anything out of the satellite phone—I don’t know if the battery’s flat or I’m just doing it wrong—and the GPS will turn on, but it shows an error message. You try it.”
They tried everything they could, fiddled with buttons, looked for settings to change, but nothing worked. The phone was dead, the GPS nonsensical. The hopes of rescue that had fluttered to life inside them bled out and died.
48
Peter leaned heavily on his desk, the weight of the world on his shoulders. His senior man was in the lockup, the man’s wife was in despair, and the search team was in chaos.
The prisoner should have been transferred immediately to Invercargill, especially since it was one of his own staff. But the city had all hands chasing a series of armed robberies, and they’d asked Peter to hold Tom till morning. Sometimes they took liberties, knowing Peter’s previous CIB credentials, and usually he didn’t mind. But he could have done without their trust, this time.
He was dog tired and tonight he’d have to sleep on a camp stretcher in his office, because he couldn’t leave the watch house unattended, in case the blasted building burnt down and killed the inmate. He couldn’t ask Amber to do it. She’d done far more than her fair share of overtime this past week.
Across the desk, Ellen was wrapped in the same gray blanket they’d given her last time. At least she’d stopped weeping, at last.
Peter sighed and leaned back in his chair.
“So, do you mind telling me how you got the estimable Mr Dickens to give you that will?”
“Do you really want to know?”
He groaned. “By the sounds of it, no I don’t. But I have to. It’s evidence. What did you tell him?”
“I had quite a speech prepared, with various alternative endings depending on how things went. But in the end I didn’t tell him anything. He was out at a meeting. Or perhaps on his yacht. It turns out that his assistant has both a daughter and a modicum of common sense.”
Peter stared at her and said nothing as the implications jostled in his head.
“I’m sorry Peter, if this creates problems for you. But my instincts were that we absolutely had to see that document, and once I did see it, I knew it was imperative that you get Tom off the search, whether it hurt a court case or not. What might a desperate man do, so that his sick daughter can inherit a fortune he thinks will save her life? She doesn’t get a penny unless the rest of them are dead. It seems likely that he has already sabotaged the search, and we can’t risk him doing anything else. We simply don’t know what he might have arranged with Bryan, and he’s refusing to tell you, isn’t he?”
He didn’t answer that. “I hope the things Tom said in the search room today don’t get disallowed in court because they were prompted by my possession of an illegally obtained document. Any other evidence against him is circumstantial.”