Poison Bay (29 page)

“The document wasn’t illegally obtained. I just asked for it without any deception or duress, and she gave it to me freely. And then I gave it to you. You couldn’t get it that way and still be able to use it, but I’m not a policeman conducting an official investigation that has to be covered by warrants. Red tape doesn’t bind me like it does you. I’m just a mother acting on my own initiative, and you knew nothing about it until it was done. I made sure of that.”

He pondered that. She was probably right. But if the aggrieved lawyer decided to represent Tom, how much trouble would he have on his hands? “I wonder how long that lawyer’s assistant will keep her job?”

“I got the feeling I don’t need to worry too much about her. Once I told her what had been going on, I was more inclined to have sympathy for Mr Dickens. I suspect he’ll be getting an earful tonight. And once the truth of all this is made public, he’s not going to want to advertise the fact that he defended the rights of a dead murderer above those of a bunch of innocent people. When he knew what had happened, he must have realized that Tom was a danger.”

The phone rang beside Peter and he stared at it, jaded. He answered it on the third ring, discovered it was the pathologist, and realized with a start that Ellen still didn’t know about today’s discovery. He toyed with the idea of asking her to leave the room, and then decided not to bother. She’d hear it on the news anyway, soon enough.

“The cold has interfered with normal processes, but I’d hazard a guess she died between two and four days ago,” said Jonesy. “Suffocation was the cause of death, but she also showed signs of frostbite. If she had hypothermia before she died, it would have weakened her, made it harder to fight back.”

“No fingerprints, or anything else useful?”

“The SOCOs found a lot of fingerprints. None in the right places. Most likely left when her friends were packaging her up. But I have got one thing to cheer you up. We found a fiber in her right nostril—the type of thing they make gloves out of.”

“So the killer wore gloves. We’ll have to hope we can identify which gloves, and who was wearing them at the time.”

“That’s right.”

“Any confirmation on ID?”

“She matches the passport, and doesn’t look like any of the others. We’re as sure as we can be, without a relative to check.”

As Peter put the phone back on its rest, he looked at Ellen. She was alert and watchful. His end of the conversation hadn’t given her too many details, but it was enough for her to know someone was dead, and they hadn’t died peacefully.

He spoke gently. “We found Sharon Healy today.”

“Dead?” Her voice wasn’t much more than a whisper.

“Suffocated.”

Her eyes filled with tears. “She’s got a little boy. Only about three or four years old.”

“I know. I’ve got a fun phone call to make tonight.” He sighed.

“Where was she?”

“On a mountain side, in the north western corner of the national park.”

“North, not south.” They both knew what that meant. Tom had been pushing them south. He probably knew the hikers were actually north.
 

“We’re basing the search on that area now. Depends how far they’ve traveled since she died. But it’s better information than we had before.”

If they’d searched north to begin with as Amber had suggested, who knew if Sharon might still be alive?

49

The wind had passed the point of insanity about fifteen minutes ago when they moved onto an even more exposed section of the mountain’s collarbone. They had to get to its shoulder, a level tussocky area they could see above them. Jack silently prayed it would provide a passage into a valley that might lead towards the lake and people. The white-capped peak loomed far overhead on the right, a stream of snow flicking off its top like a flyaway fringe. Staying upright had become a pitched battle against the wind. There was no way to spend the night on this rocky slope, nowhere to pitch a tent, nowhere to light a cooking fire, and even if it didn’t rain and they slept under the stars inside their orange plastic bags, there was no reasonable space in which to lay four humans.
 

The long, slow evening was drawing in. There was no other way. They had to keep going.

Jack was leading, Rachel behind him, her forearms linked through the straps on the rear of his backpack to conserve her energy. The team had devoted Kain’s energy bars to Rachel and it was helping her, but they were being rationed—a sliver at a time. No one knew how long they would need them to last.

Callie was bringing up the rear, and leaning hard against Erica’s rucksack from behind, but not for her own support. The smallest and lightest one there, Erica was most vulnerable to the force of the wind. Her feet had lifted from the ground on more than one occasion before an even more savage blast hurled her bodily against the rocks. Bruised and disorientated, she’d clung to the granite and pleaded for help.

Every step was grueling for Jack, crouching low and dragging the combined weight of his own body, his rucksack and most of Rachel’s bodyweight and load. He concentrated on where to put each step, trying not to think how far he still had to go. Water began to slap him in the face.
Please, not rain again
. He looked up. No, it wasn’t coming from the clouds, but off the pass. It took him a while to figure out what it could be. There must be a tarn—a small mountain lake—up there, invisible beyond the lip of the pass, its contents being scooped up by the wind and flung at them, a few buckets-full at a time. The spray became heavier, falling in sheets, and he fumbled to raise his jacket hood, but it was impossible to keep it on his head in that wind, so he gave up and continued bare-headed, wet-haired, step by arduous step. At least it warned him that a tarn lay in their path if they continued this trajectory, so he began to angle to the right, hoping to get beyond its reach, and in due course, pass to the side of it.
 

When they finally emerged onto the tussock-covered platform that they hoped marked the beginning of a pass, there was no relief. It must have been a hundred meters wide, but being comparatively flat and elevated, it subjected them to the full screaming wrath of the wind. They fell into a huddle on the ground, and clung to each other. Erica was sobbing aloud; that final stretch had intensified the terrors and agonies of a most brutal day.

Jack shouted above the rush of air. “You lot stay here, and I’ll look for a campsite.”

“How on earth are we going to be able to camp?” said Rachel. She waited for no answer, merely put her face on her arms, lying prone on the ground.
 

Erica still sobbed, and Jack glanced at Callie. She nodded, and he crawled off on all fours, staying low to the ground. He hadn’t even discarded his rucksack for this reconnoiter, but instead kept it on for extra ballast, hoping it might help him not to get blown off the mountain altogether. When he returned he couldn’t stop grinning. “You’re not gonna believe this! It’s perfect!”

***

Two hours later, they were sitting round a small-but-comforting campfire as the last light faded from the sky, their bellies full of warm ferns flavored with a slice of energy bar—Rachel had insisted they not keep them all for her. Only a light breeze twitched at the tent flaps. The windstorm still raged overhead, but they felt secure in a little oasis of calm. Jack had found a ridge on the far side of the pass, curving up high above the tussocks into a supremely effective natural windbreak. It was so high that they could even stand up without hitting the windstorm. Underneath them, the lumpy tussocks were like cushions compared to the surfaces they’d slept on recently. The simple pleasures of their alpine campsite felt like five-star comfort after the hellish day they’d endured.

The murmur of conversation among them eventually turned to the emergency equipment again, and Jack retrieved the GPS and phone from his pack, so everyone could have another go at getting them to work. Everyone tried, but there was no joy.

Callie said, “I guess the question is: were they broken in the fall, have the batteries gone flat because Kain’s used them up, or were they never working in the first place?”

Jack shrugged, but Erica didn’t share his uncertainty. “I’ll bet you any money you like it was another of Bryan’s horrible little tricks. To make Kain think he was the chosen survivor, going to win the prize, but then giving him equipment to hide from us that doesn’t even work.” She snorted: derision with an edge of despair. “At least the gun actually
worked
.”

 
“What do you mean by the prize?” Callie said.

Jack answered, not Erica. “Money, I would think.”

“What else would Bryan have that Kain might want?” Erica’s tone was bitter now. “I mean, think about it. If you were a loony with lots of money, and you wanted to buy some help in making sure all of us died, which of the seven of us would you target?”

They all considered that for a moment. Faces, names, personalities. It was an uncomfortable thought. Kain had worn his poverty like a protest banner as a teenager, and had gloated in his comparative wealth during this reunion.

“Kain hated the fact that money gave Bryan power,” Erica said. “And he hated it even more that it gave Bryan Liana. He’d have jumped at the chance to finally win. I don’t know if he knew the details of how it was going to unfold. But I believe he was expecting us to die and him to live. Otherwise, why would he have all this gear? And why would he not tell us about it? He didn’t even tell me!”

Rachel said, “You didn’t tell us about the gun.” Erica fell silent.

Jack said, “If Bryan told Erica to make sure no one else survived, he probably told Kain the same thing. He must have offered him pretty big money, to make that seem worthwhile.”
 

Callie nodded. “I guess Kain was hoping nature might do most of the work for him. Or Bryan might have convinced him that it would.”

“He’d probably be planning to find a way to outlast us,” Jack said. “Use the GPS to make it out to civilization, then toss the equipment in a lake in time to be grateful to his rescuers. And sell his story to the tabloids as the miraculous sole survivor of a big tragic accident.”

“Erica, if you didn’t know how to tell us, something similar could have happened to Kain,” Callie said. “He might have been supposed to get rid of the rest of us, but after Sharon died, he couldn’t do it. He might have regretted whatever he’d agreed to do for Bryan, but it had all gone too far by then and he didn’t know how to tell us. Got himself painted into a corner.” She shrugged.
 

“Let’s hope that’s how it was,” Jack said. “But they are very different secrets to be keeping. Erica hid a weapon of questionable value. Kain hid emergency equipment he must have thought could bring rescuers within twenty-four hours.”

Callie had a sudden insight. “He couldn’t test the phone or emergency beacon without drawing attention from the outside world, but he might have tested the GPS, when he was off by himself. And it worked, sort of, so he might have assumed he was doing something wrong with it.”
 

Jack nodded slowly. “But after he heard Adam was shot, he could have tested the other two and found out they were completely dead. He barely reacted when I told him Adam was dead, but then when I said he’d been shot… well, shocked doesn’t even begin to cover the expression on his face. That must have been the first hint that Bryan was double-crossing him. He went straight back into his tent when I left to go back to you guys. He was probably ferreting in his sleeping bag before I was even three meters away.”

Callie said, “That might be why he reacted so strongly today when we asked if Bryan knew about his affair with Liana. It probably hadn’t occurred to him that Bryan approached him for the opposite reasons to the ones he claimed.”

“But did he kill Sharon?” Jack said.

“He was terrified the night Sharon died,” Erica said. “When he and Adam couldn’t get over that mountain the day before… that seemed to be when he first actually realized just how much danger we were in. Up until then, I think he’d been assuming he was big and strong and he’d get out of it okay. But that night he said, ‘No one could survive out here on their own.’ I told him that’s why we were sticking together, but it didn’t seem to comfort him. He was really rattled.”
 

Callie looked thoughtful. “He might have thought Sharon was going to die anyway, and decided to give nature a helping hand to save the rest of us.”

“Knowing we suspected him of killing Sharon gave him a jolt,” Jack said. “If he did kill her, hearing there was a piece of evidence against him would have made him realize how much trouble he was in. Plus he must have started wondering whether whatever reward Bryan had promised him was going to be delivered. Or whether he’d get quite the opposite, like a pile of evidence delivered to the police, or even a direct attempt on his life waiting for him.”

Callie nodded. “I wonder if that’s why he ate the berries—to test Bryan’s veracity. He must have felt the symptoms of the poisoning, realized what was happening to his body, and yet he just kept eating the damn things, one after another.” She sighed.

Jack stared at her. “What you’re suggesting is… well, it’s virtually suicide.”

“Can you imagine how Kain would feel about going to jail?” she said.
 

“He couldn’t bear that.” Erica shook her head emphatically. “He’d think of all his lawyer friends taunting him. And the shame for his family.”

“He said he was set up.” Callie instantly had three sets of eyes locked onto hers. “Just before he went onto the ledge, I tried to stop him, and he spoke to me. ‘He set me up,’ that’s what he said. And that he couldn’t believe what he’d done and he was sorry about the little boy.” It struck her, suddenly and forcibly, what that meant, and she put her head in her hands. “Oh no. He did kill Sharon.”

“And he wished he hadn’t,” said Rachel, her eyes full of tears. “Oh dear God, I can’t stand this.”

50

Saturday, Seven Days Lost

Jack slept deeply despite the thoughts of Kain that roiled through his mind as he lay down. Since the previous sleepless night, he’d discovered there was no sniper on their tail, and, with the death of Kain, apparently no smotherer in their midst either. With the number of known mortal enemies reduced to two—the environment and Rachel’s diabetes—the anxious hand clutching at his innards relaxed a little. Just enough to seem like freedom by comparison.