Authors: Donna Malane
Grinning, I asked if I could bring my dog, and Robbie sounded like he was grinning too when he said, ‘Sure.’
I offered to pick Robbie up from the Wainuiomata Police Station so we could drive the rest of the way in one car, but he rather bashfully admitted that tomorrow was his day off, and suggested it might be better to meet at the car park entrance to the forest. He asked if 6 a.m. would work for me, and then it was my turn to say ‘Sure’ — and I was
definitely
grinning. We giggled like a couple of naughty schoolkids when he reminded me that the ranger had a bit of an attitude about dogs so we might have to keep out of his way. I let myself enjoy the sound of his breathing in my ear for a full ten seconds before I rang off.
Truly, truly tragic.
The evening’s intimate cross-species tête à tête didn’t turn out to be quite as intimate as I’d planned. With exquisite delicacy and good manners, Wolf had taken the bone from my hand and loped off to his special gnawing place to spend quality time with it, and I’d just squeezed the steaming rice out of the bag on to a plate, only burning myself twice in the process, when Gemma turned
up clutching a couple of bottles of Pinot. We both knew they were peace offerings, and that she’d come to apologise for what she’d said about my relationship with Niki.
Her heartfelt and genuine apology took the form of not mentioning it or referring to it in any way at all — which was just fine with me. I doled out two plates of rice since neither Gemma nor Wolf was too keen on sharing his bone for dinner. Two bottles of wine later our relationship was back on track, almost like nothing had happened. Almost. It certainly wasn’t Gemma I was holding a grudge against. It was me. Gemma was right. I’d judged Niki, holding myself up as the success story to the mirror of her failure. I’d need to look at all that more closely one day. One day soon, in fact.
But first, I had to find out who killed her. Not just who put the knife in her back. I was still convinced Snow was the jerk who’d actually done it, but I was pretty sure someone had taken out a hit on my little sister, and that person was probably the guy who then killed Snow to cover his tracks. Chris Ross was number one on my suspect list. Whoever he was, I couldn’t and wouldn’t stop until I’d found out. I’d lost too much already to turn back now.
Gemma finally did say something before she lowered herself into the taxi. She told me Niki loved me, and that I’d been a great sister to her. For one blissful minute I took it as the gift it was and even believed it. I must have been drunker than I thought.
R
obbie and I tramped at a much easier pace than the one the ranger had set, and once we were in the shelter of the bush the soft rain was hardly more than a fine spritz, making the walk relaxed and easy. Wolf put all that police training bullshit behind him, and drunkenly zigzagged ahead of us, sniffing and peeing self-importantly while we ambled along behind.
I told Robbie about my meeting with Sarah, filling him in on how the boots ended up at the Sallies where our John Doe must have bought them. We agreed it was unlikely the boots would have stayed in the shop for long, so we were still looking at an earliest possible date of late 1969 for when he went missing.
Robbie found the side track we were to take and that got us talking about dead ends, and the next thing I knew I was telling him about me and Sean. Maybe it was because we were walking while we talked and didn’t have to make eye contact, or maybe it was because Robbie is one of those really easy people to talk to — whatever it was, I’d tracked my marriage to Sean, told about our break-up, and even described the ghastly meeting with the new
pregnant girlfriend in the lobby of the police HQ the previous day, before I realised that this was the first time I’d been able to talk about any of it without wanting to run.
Admittedly, since I was already walking, I guess I was partway there — but still, this was an achievement. And the weird thing was, in telling Robbie about it, I didn’t feel sad. I stole a glance at him. He looked relaxed. Maybe a little thoughtful, but not too deeply affected by my having laid out my whole marriage break-up, and pathetic, sad life on what, in effect, was only our second date. He must have felt me looking at him because he threw me one of his easy smiles.
‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘You ask one question and I fill you in on my entire life story.’
Robbie whistled a soft two-note call and, to my surprise, Wolf came crashing back towards him through the bracken.
‘Not your whole life story. Just the first instalment,’ he said, and gave Wolf a good strong slap on the haunch before signalling, with a minute head-tilt, for him to go on ahead. Robbie caught my leery expression as I watched my dog do exactly as instructed by a complete stranger. Apart from Sean, and occasionally me, Wolf had never responded to anyone else’s instructions. In fact, he’d been trained not to react to anyone except us, and yet here he was at this stranger’s beck and call.
Robbie ducked his head in apology.
‘I was a handler,’ he explained. ‘When I first started out, that’s all I wanted to do, work with dogs. My granddad had a farm just out of Gore, and I spent a lot of my time there as a kid, so I grew up with dogs.’
Figures, I thought. He probably loves kids too.
‘I’m useless with kids,’ he added, and threw that grin at me as if he’d read my thoughts. ‘And women,’ he added. ‘But dogs and me get on okay.’
I was about to ask him why he was no longer a dog handler, when he pushed ahead through some scrubby manuka into a clearing, and I saw we’d arrived at the same hut but from a different track than when I’d gone there with Scott.
I rested against the veranda, and watched Wolf follow at Robbie’s heels as he strode off to find the entrance to the south-west track that we hoped would lead us to where the John Doe’s left boot had been found. He located it almost immediately, and we decided to set off again without a break. The days were lengthening but we both knew darkness fell early in the bush, and that we’d need to be back on the main track well before sunset.
For the next couple of kilometres or so the bush was dense, and pockets of tangled supplejack made the going slow, tough, and at times painful. The track itself was pretty much non-existent so conversation was on hold while we tore, scratched, and crawled our way forward, all the time keeping an eye out for the little orange plastic ties that indicated the original track.
Wolf was thrilled by this intrepid behaviour, and showed it by crashing ahead then circling back to herd us into his orbit, all the time grinning, slobbering, and periodically letting out little yelps of pleasure. I suspect Robbie would have behaved in the same way if I hadn’t been there. In fact, I was thinking that if they could have ditched me without any fuss, they’d probably have run off together grinning and licking each other enthusiastically.
Okay, I admit it. I was jealous of my dog. Because the fact was, Robbie’s body heat was having a similar effect on me. Well, maybe not the slobbering, but as for the grinning, licking and little yelps of pleasure — most definitely.
For the last 500 or so metres we crunched our way up a stony creek bed, criss-crossing the ankle-deep, icy water to avoid the muddy eddies that might be concealing waist-deep water holes. By
the time Robbie dropped his pack at the base of an ancient rimu, I was out of breath, red in the face, covered in mud, and my feet were numb with cold. I knew I looked like shit but I felt fantastic.
Like a magician, Robbie produced a Thermos from his pack, and while I leaned against the rimu and sipped the steaming coffee, he clambered over a couple of rotting tree trunks. Wolf lowered his butt onto my boot, and we both watched Robbie disappear from sight. For another thirty seconds I could hear the crack of his boots snapping on branches, and then even that was gone.
Wolf lay down, neck flattened, snout stretched between his paws in the direction Robbie had taken. I refused to be quite so obvious, and instead stamped around in circles in an attempt to get some feeling back into my feet. I’d just drained the last gritty dregs of the coffee when Wolf suddenly leapt up whining, and seconds later I heard Robbie’s whistle.
It took me a few minutes to make my way to where he was standing, a camera to his eye and that smile hitching his face like a cinema curtain. Wolf saw it before I did, and let out one sharp bark, then immediately sat at heel, his attention riveted on the tangle of undergrowth at Robbie’s feet.
The frame of the pack was rusted and pitted, the canvas bleached to a pale mint colour. At first glance it looked like an old 1960s postie’s bag. It was undoubtedly our John Doe’s pack. I didn’t mind telling Robbie I was impressed.
He shrugged. ‘Once I’d located where the tramper said he’d found the boot,’ he said, pointing back over my shoulder, ‘it was just a matter of following the natural curve of the land, and figuring out the direction big dumps of rain would have dragged anything that didn’t have good roots.’ He shook his head, annoyed at himself. ‘First time I came in, looking for the skull, I approached from a different track. Guess that’s why I missed it.’
We left the pack undisturbed, and spent the next fifteen minutes scouting out the area, Robbie taking photos and making notes of the surrounds. We walked about halfway back to the big rimu, he showed me the place the tramper had found the boot, and from there we tracked back towards the pack, calling excitedly to each other as we pieced together what we thought was the most likely sequence of events. Wolf joined in with the odd explanatory bark, and by the time we hunkered back down in front of the pack we’d all agreed that our John Doe had probably slipped and fractured his ankle somewhere near the old rimu, and had managed to limp, or more likely hop, for a hundred metres or so before he’d taken his boot off, maybe to strap the ankle, or maybe just to ease the pain. Realising he couldn’t walk out, he’d probably slid and crawled, dragging his pack with him until he reached the naturally formed dugout just above where Robbie had found the pack.
We’d need to get a map to confirm it, but as far as Robbie could make out, and as far as I could pretend to follow the geography he described, the cave the John Doe had eventually holed up in, where he’d scratched his message to Lara, was about two and a half kilometres as the crow flies from where we now stood. We were both silent as we contemplated this. It must have taken him days to crawl that distance, and he would have been in excruciating pain the whole time.
‘And hungry,’ Robbie added. ‘He probably stayed here until he ran out of food.’
My stomach rumbled in sympathy. ‘The fact that he tried to crawl out rather than wait to be found suggests he knew no one was going to come looking for him.’
‘And he was right,’ Robbie agreed.
I felt a surge of anger so powerful and unexpected that I had to put my hand on a tree trunk to steady myself. How was it possible
that with all the billions of people in the world, someone could die alone? How was it possible for a young man to be missing long enough to starve to death without anyone realising he was gone? Surely someone had loved this man at some time in his life? How could any human live twenty-odd years on this planet, and have so little impact on it that they die alone; and then, for the next forty years, no one so much as registers they’re missing?
I didn’t trust myself to speak. Robbie was silent too as he stared at the backpack, perhaps also thinking what a lonely way it was to die. A couple of tuis weren’t. They crooned and clacked and argued with each other in the canopy.
I had a flash of Niki on the peppermint-green of the golf course, felt the pain of the boning knife going in, Snow leaning over watching her as she died. His leering face would have been the last thing she’d seen.
Robbie’s voice brought me back to the present. ‘Let’s have a quick look,’ he said, and started dragging the pack out of the tangle of weeds that had colonised it. ‘We’re going to have to hoof it back if we’re to get out before nightfall,’ he added, looking towards the gloomy hills.
It took a bit of dragging and chopping, but finally we had the pack upright, resting on its metal legs. I tried to pull the canvas tags through the buckles but they were weathered closed and my fingers were numb with cold. Eventually we resorted to cutting. Inside, the pack was surprisingly dry, though when we opened the main flap there was a distinct waft of rotted vegetation. Could have been worse.
I lifted out a woollen jersey, and then felt something hard at the centre of it. My mouth went dry with excitement. It was a notebook wrapped carefully in a piece of soft leather, a thin strip of hand-woven tapestry looped around it. Holding the book in one hand, I
managed to untie the strip and carefully open the cover. Though it was dry now, despite the leather wrapping, enough water at some time had trickled in and stuck all the pages together.
I gently peeled back a page. It was like lifting off a sheet of sunburnt skin. The page — all the pages — were blank. No writing at all. Nothing.
Robbie and I shared a disappointed look. I held the book up to catch the light: the pages had a very faint blue tinge, like veins under the skin of a newborn baby’s skull. It was all that remained of whatever John Doe had written. Whatever message he’d left was now nothing more than a gentle blue wash on bleached paper. He’d been dead, his body unclaimed, unmissed for forty years, and now even his last words had been erased. His voice silenced forever.
I
t took us more than three hours to reach the car park, by which time it was completely dark. Robbie had brought a torch with him but the night was clear and the moonlight strong enough for us to manage the last half hour of the track without it. Normally I’d have loved this night bush-walk. Wolf certainly did. He seemed to have nothing on his mind except the moonlight and the intriguing night smells around him, but I’d been nursing uneasy thoughts and fell silent.
I couldn’t help wondering about John Doe’s spirit or his soul or whatever it is that continues on, waiting all those years, a lifetime, for someone to claim his body. Waiting for someone to say a prayer or a mantra or pour a shot of scotch on the soil as a final gesture of farewell. Waiting for someone to give him a so-called ‘decent’ burial. Waiting for tears. For words. The tree planted to mark the spot, the cross, or the cairn of stones. Even elephants return to their loved ones’ bones to stroke the whitened remains in remembrance. Everybody deserves some ritual of burial.
But this man had received none of it, and that made me deeply
sad and uneasy somehow, as if it was now up to me to put him to rest. When Robbie paused to retie his bootlace I told him what I’d been thinking.
‘I don’t think a soul can rest until their body’s been claimed,’ I said. I felt a bit silly using the word ‘soul’ but I was saved by the semi-darkness, and anyway, right here and now I couldn’t think of a better word for it. ‘Everyone deserves that.’
Robbie swapped feet and retied his other boot, his face thoughtful in the moonlight. ‘Yeah,’ he agreed. ‘It doesn’t seem a lot to ask, does it?’
We set off again at a quickened pace, as if the thought of being dead and unclaimed had given us both the yips. I think it had. We were quiet, thinking our own thoughts for a while, and then Robbie said he’d send photos of the notebook, the leather wrapping, and the strip of tapestry to a couple of newspapers, and see if someone out there recognised them — but we both knew this was a long shot. Worst of all was not finding the skull. We’d stayed and hunted for it as long as we could, but finally had to admit defeat. The excitement of finding the backpack and the notebook, only to have my expectations dashed with the discovery of the erased words, had left me feeling gloomy.
When Robbie said he felt the same, I realised there was some comfort in feeling gloomy
with
someone. In fact, learning that we felt gloomy together immediately cheered us up, and by the time I’d helped him to load the John Doe pack into the boot of his car, and Wolf had spread himself across the back seat of mine with what might as well have been a ‘do not disturb’ sign plastered across his forehead, Robbie and I were happily making arrangements to meet up for a late meal in town.
He suggested we could shower at his place first, and we grinned stupidly at each other, knowing that if we went to his place now
we wouldn’t be eating or showering any time soon. He opened my driver’s door for me, and held his other arm out in a mock gesture of gallantry. His body presented to me like that was too much, too good to resist, and I stepped in against it. We stood pressed together, feeling each other’s body warmth, and smiling inanely at each other for what felt like forever. And then very slowly he leaned in and took my bottom lip between his.
It’s such a simple little phrase, ‘a kiss’. A tiny phrase to describe such a sweet, moist prelude to love-making. He tasted and smelt delicious. The Joni Mitchell line ‘I could drink a case of you’ sang in my head. I was thinking, bugger the shower and the prelude, but just as I slid my hands inside his shirt the lights of an approaching vehicle angled across the clearing, and we automatically stepped apart.
Once home, Wolf put up a good argument for spending the night exactly where he was, and it took quite a bit of coaxing to get him out of the car and into the house. The air-bed mattress and Wolf both made the same collapsing sound as his body dropped on to it, and with one profound groan he went back to sleep. I looked at him lying there like an aged dragon, body curled with his muzzle resting on his haunch, his lips luffing like an unsecured sail each time he breathed out. For the first time I noticed all the grey on his muzzle and around his eyes. He was an old dog. It must have happened in the last year, but somehow I hadn’t noticed. The walk, all those flamboyant canine antics and efforts to impress Robbie, had taken it out of him. His exhaustion confirmed my suspicions that his usual walks with Damian were more meditative than aerobic, which, given the state of him now, was probably a good thing.
I showered, soaped and perfumed my body, and wondered if Robbie was doing a male version of the same. The thought of Robbie in the shower made me break out in goosebumps. I spent
some time agonising over what underwear to put on. I hadn’t bought new undies for a long time and, scrabbling through my euphemistically named lingerie drawer, I realised my options were either sexy and shabby or sensible and smart. Easy decision. I’ve never been sensible and now was no time to start.
Before leaving the house, I did a quick check of the bedroom to make sure there was nothing too personal in it. If Robbie came back home with me, which I sure hoped he would, I didn’t want him stumbling on anything that would embarrass either of us. I knew there were no photos of Sean around — I’d removed them all some months ago. There were photos of Niki and me as kids and as adults, but that was okay. It didn’t mean I’d have to talk about what happened to her.
Knees clicking, I hunkered down for a quiet talk with Wolf. I warned him I might be bringing a friend home, and that he wasn’t to get jealous if the friend climbed into bed with me. He didn’t even open an eye, which could have meant he was traumatised at the thought of me sleeping with a man other than Sean or, more optimistically, judging from the way he’d acted with Robbie during the day, it meant he was giving his full canine approval. I decided to go with that reading of his non-response, told him he was a good dog, and then, feeling like a teenager sneaking out on a date, tiptoed out of the bedroom.
We’d arranged to meet at Kazu, a cosy upstairs Japanese bar that served skewered tuna and other tasty titbits grilled over a tiny charcoal barbecue. The atmosphere was smoky from the grill, and intimate in a noisy, friendly, boozy kind of way. It was my favourite bar — one of the few it was possible to go to without being hit on. It just wasn’t a hit-on kind of place.
Kazu became my watering hole in the months after Niki died — the place where I’d drink methodically until either Sean picked me
up at the end of his shift, or I staggered down to a cab in Courtenay Place. Robbie said he’d spent a fair bit of time in Kazu as well, and we expressed surprise at not having seen each other there. Maybe he
had
seen me during that time and was just being polite, or maybe the time for seeing each other just wasn’t right.
I could still remember the first time I set eyes on Sean. Straight away I knew … well, I knew something. I knew we were going to slam into each other in every way it’s possible for two people to slam. I knew he would turn my world inside out and upside down. I knew I was going to fall in love, and I knew that eventually it was going to hurt like hell, and I knew too that it would be worth it. There hadn’t been anything like that when I’d met Robbie, no big premonitions, but the man was undoubtedly having an effect on me, and I was liking it.
Too wired to stay inside, I walked out to the curb to wait for my taxi. All that agonising over which undies to wear had made me late. The night was clear and still, the moon shone brightly, and all the street lamps were lit, so there was no excuse for me not to pay more attention to the man walking towards me, his collar turned up against the non-existent rain, his head bent on non-existent thoughts.
Lost in the future, I didn’t even notice him until he was up in my face saying something about a light. Before I could register a response, his punch landed in my gut with such force that I fell into him, winded, retching and in agony. Pain roared in my senses and blocked out any thoughts trying desperately to register. As I was half dragged, half carried across the pavement, in some stuttering part of my brain I could hear Wolf barking and bashing his paws against the window, but it was distant, removed somehow, as if the world had become an old super-eight movie running at the wrong speed — frames dropping out entirely, or flickering, blurred. My
yell became nothing more than drool and a retching groan. It had all happened so damn fast.
I registered the car I was being dragged to as a big, black four-door Holden Commodore sedan, probably about six or seven years old. I even noted the tyres were Turanza ER 300s — the ones with the asymmetrical tread — before I was slammed head first into the gap between the front and back seats. With no time to raise my hands to soften the crash, I went straight down, cracking my forehead on something on the way. My legs were shoved in after me, the force of it ramming my head further under the front passenger seat. A nasty carpet burn stung my cheek, and I tasted the saltiness of blood. I heard the car door slam shut, and before I’d even thought of trying to pull my head out from under the seat, the driver had started the car and slid it quietly out from the curb.
I spent the first thirty seconds trying not to pass out. When the next big black wave rolled towards me I rubbed my grazed cheek into the flooring, hoping the pain would keep me conscious. The carpet smelt of bubblegum. Okay, I figured, if I could smell, it probably meant my nose wasn’t broken. That was something. My knee, I wasn’t so optimistic about.
A high-pitched screaming noise was going on and on — for one truly weird minute I thought it might be me making the sound. The taste of my own blood was strangely comforting. A voice suddenly cut through the screaming, and as I tried desperately to make sense of his words, the high-pitched wailing sound receded to background noise. So it wasn’t me screaming, then. Good.
That stutter-frame film thing was still happening, and at first I could only register every second or third word he said. I heard ‘bitch’ and ‘cops’, and then the word ‘blackmail’ crashed through. I gritted my teeth, blocked out the pain my body was screaming at me to do something about, and tried to focus on each word, but
still I couldn’t make sense of what he was saying. It wasn’t until I heard ‘Bonnie’ that I truly focused. Bonnie — Niki’s working name.
‘… bitch sister of yours destroyed my life and I’m not going to let you start that all over again.’
Even though I’d never heard him speak, even though my ‘bitch sister’ had probably destroyed a lot of men’s lives, I knew immediately which one this was. Chris Ross. The man who’d hired Snow to kill Niki, and then killed Snow to shut him up. Spying on Ross from the alleyway had been a stupid mistake and I’d known it at the time. Being busted by Ross in the act of doing it was even stupider. Fuck! If I hadn’t already figured it, I knew now, without any doubt, that I was in very deep shit.
Fully conscious now, my brain was working in ‘oh shit!’ hyper-survival mode while my body had effectively switched into sleep function. I had no feeling at all from my neck down. My brain told me it had been forced to turn off its pain awareness sector while it got me to wake the fuck up and start thinking! If my body position had allowed it, I’d have kicked myself. From the moment we’d pulled away from the curb I should have concentrated on the route, counted the turns and directions the sedan made, and registered the sounds we drove past that might give me a clue to where my kidnapper was taking me. I concentrated really hard, but all I heard was the noise of a grinding universal and Ross’s ranting.
‘Janine wouldn’t even let me see the kids. Said I was a sad, sick fuck and she didn’t want her children exposed to that. I’d already paid Bonnie everything I had, and then Janine went and took the rest.’ He paused in his rant and I felt his weight shift in the seat.
‘Well, I’m not going to have you fuck me over all over again.’
His voice was louder as he turned to look over his shoulder. He’s changing lanes, I thought, and couldn’t resist a smile at my cleverness as I felt the car surge to the left, then straighten up again.
Carefully, quietly, I inched my head back out from under the front passenger seat. I needed to get my face turned around so I could see out the car window. Even prone on the floor, I was hopeful I’d be able to glimpse high-rises or advertising hoardings, and maybe get a bead on where I was.
It was a slow and excruciating process, and I had to block out the worst of the pain signals that flared through my brain’s temporary barrier. Ross raved on but I wasn’t listening any more. It took maybe two or three minutes but eventually I got my head out from under the seat. Still lying on my stomach, my legs thrust up beneath me, I managed to twist my shoulders and neck around to face the passenger window directly behind Ross. I could see the back of his head, the black woollen jacket collar pulled up, thinning greasy hair combed close against his scalp. Blue-black sky. Nothing else. No buildings. No advertisement banners. No neon lights.
I let my head fall back to the floor and rested my cheek against the carpet while I took in a couple of deep breaths. Okay, I thought, we’re not in the CBD then. I shut my eyes and tried to gauge the speed we were travelling at. Too fast for Courtenay Place. I’d have caught a glimpse of high-rises. He wasn’t stopping for traffic light changes, so that counted out both Lambton and Aotea Quays. The car hadn’t slowed for some time. No one gets that many green lights, I thought, and then congratulated myself: okay, good, you’re doing good. And we hadn’t gone through enough intersections or turns for this to be the suburbs. Very slowly, I turned my head again. Suddenly a big, oblong orange light flew past the window. Moments later, a car horn directly behind my head blasted, and I saw Ross glance out the passenger window. We were on the motorway. That explained why the car interior was so well lit.
I felt a wave of euphoria at this little success, which just goes to show that sometimes you can take happiness from even the
most ghastly situations in life. Now I just had to figure out which motorway we were on. Either we were heading north on state highway one, or we were on highway two heading out towards the Hutt Valley. If we were on SH1, I reckoned by now we would be some way past the Johnsonville off-ramp. If we were on SH2, I’d know it when we hit the winding hill road over to the Wairarapa. Niki used to rather gleefully call it ‘Diane’s Vomit Hill’ for obvious reason, and lying as I was on the floor of the car, I knew I would react in technicolour to the first major bend we hit. I tuned Ross in again. He hadn’t paused in his rant since he’d thrown me in the back.