Hindsight (52 page)

‘Hire
him
?’ Greggie laughed. ‘Are you kidding? I
killed
him! Burned him alive — same as I did with
them
.’

‘You didn’t do a very good job,’ Patterson said smugly. ‘What did you do, burn us in effigy?’

‘
You’re
the one who’s dead,’ Lockman said, keen to get his hands on both father and son. ‘Your treatment of those captives is reprehensible!’

‘Hey, she brought that on herself!’ Greggie argued, glowing red-faced with rage. ‘I was being gentle. She’s one of my girls now, future mother of my kid! She’s gunna miss that hand when it comes time for changing nappies, but no, she just kept trying to rip off my bits!’

‘And Bennet Chiron?’ asked Lockman, disgusted. ‘Is he one of your girls now too?’

‘He refused to say a word about the blind bitch. He’s lucky he’s not dead, but we need him to control her. Listen, Pops. If we’re leaving, we need to take him — take all of them — so all the aces stay up our sleeves. You and me together, Pops, same team as always.’

Gregan screwed up his face, but sent two men back up the stairs to carry their hostages down using bed sheets as stretchers, then he looked back to his son with a serious frown. ‘What exactly did you want to learn from Ben Chiron? We put him in gaol for six years. He couldn’t know anything.’

‘He’s her boyfriend, Pops! How’s that for a quirk of fate? He
must
know how she does it! And trust me, she does it fine, Pops. I’ve seen it myself! She doesn’t just see the secrets of yesterday, she sees the day before that and the day before that. Shoot me if I’m lying; she’s seen everything worth seeing right back to the night Uncle Theo bit the bullet.’

‘You told me she got away! As if that could be possible, but you expected me to believe it anyway … and I did. If you can’t trust family, who can you trust? But now these men tell me you had your own plans for her — that you planned on using her talents against me. That you set her free, deliberately trying to sabotage my partnership with Colonel Kitching! You’ve also been caught trying to break into my safe before, Greggie. All my passwords into my files, and you’ve needled me constantly for details of my contacts over the years, so who is it easier for me to believe?’

‘If you can’t trust family, who can you trust?’ Greggie said, almost weeping as he threw his father’s words back at him. ‘I wouldn’t need to break into your safe, if you trusted me with the combination!’

‘We can clear this up in no time,’ Patterson said. ‘Let’s go ask
her
what happened.’

‘She’s here?’ Greggie asked ‘I don’t believe it.’

Patterson strode to the nearest window on the inlet side of the apartment and cracked a drape open enough as an invitation to double-check for himself. Gregan did and appeared satisfied, but his son broke into a sweat with jitters. ‘It’s got to be a set-up!’ he wailed. Then Gregan’s two remaining men came down the stairs, one dragging Ben’s body in a twisted sheet while the other carried a similarly bundled Tarin Sei over his shoulder.

‘I definitely need
him
,’ Gregan said with a nod to Chiron’s limp body, ‘and the colonel wants the kid commando, but if you want the girl, Greggie, you carry her.’

M
ira sat in the middle of a row of chairs aboard the
Edukitty
with one hand tied to the seat and Gabby’s body stretched out beside her, unconscious.

She cradled Gabby’s head, checking regularly to ensure she was still breathing, and patted her cheeks gently, hoping to waken life back into her after Sergeant Pobody had grappled with her for control of the helm. Miserable with guilt, Mira knew it was all her fault — and ironic that the only weapon available to Gabby had been out of her reach and down the front of Mira’s lifejacket when Pobody had misjudged his jump aboard from the yacht, and slipped.

A two-second window of opportunity missed, and now this.

Pobody accelerated the
Edukitty
back to the beach and lowered the ramp, singing the praises of a catamaran where every knob, door, locker and switch was clearly labelled for easy use by staff and passengers who changed regularly according to rosters and class timetables.

‘Sorry about your friend,’ Pobody said. ‘I didn’t have time to argue with her.’

‘If you were really sorry, you’d have let her go,’ Mira argued. ‘What’s the plan here?

‘You’ll see … Oh, sorry,’ he added with a chuckle. ‘Poor choice of words.’

The tread of many shoes and boots, headed her way across wet grass and sand.

‘Nice ride,’ said a male voice that made her shiver. If he laughed, she knew he’d sound much like a kookaburra. ‘What’s the story with the extra passenger?’

‘Reluctant captain,’ Pobody replied. ‘She objected to sharing.’

‘Bastard!’ Lockman shouted. ‘Do you get your jollies from hurting innocent girls now, too?’

‘Shut it,’ Patterson warned, ‘or I’ll be forced to shut it for you … Get him stowed, Uno, and encourage him to sit quietly.’

‘Lieutenant?’ Mira called. ‘Are you okay?’

‘Well enough,’ he replied with a grunt as someone shoved him up the ramp to the cabin. Engines engaged, and within seconds they were accelerating out of the lagoon into the estuary and headed for the bay.

‘Woah!’ Pobody exclaimed from across the room. ‘What happened to
them
?’

‘
He
did,’ Lockman said. ‘That’s the standard of new company you’re keeping.’

Mira sensed the energy of the air change inside the cabin as many bodies swarmed in and loomed around her. She smelled blood, and sweat and other stale smells she didn’t recognise. Then the row of chairs behind her thumped as if a body had been dropped onto it, back-to-back with her, and she heard Lockman groan very close to her ear. Within seconds, she heard two more groans from opposite corners of the room, as if two other bodies had been dumped less ceremonially on the floor — one female, and the other far more frighteningly familiar.

‘Ben?’ she called frantically. ‘Ben, are you there?’

‘He’s there,’ Lockman said. ‘Unconscious for now and better it stays that way.’

‘Lieutenant?’ she cried. ‘What’s happening?’

‘I’ll answer that.’ Gregan crouched beside her and wrapped his arm around her shoulders. ‘You’re going to answer a few questions for me, dear.’ He stroked Mira’s hair, causing her to flinch and lean away from him.

‘Keep your hands off her!’ Lockman warned, but Mira heard him answered by a thud that knocked the wind and another grunt from him.

‘Stop it!’ she screamed. ‘Stop hurting people! Just ask me the question.’

‘That’s the spirit.’ Gregan stroked her hair again, and this time she suffered his touch with a shudder. ‘Show me your eyes, please, Miss Chambers.’

‘I’m blind.’ She clenched her eyes shut and turned aside. ‘What’s to see?’

‘I’m curious.’ Plucking off her glasses, he gripped her chin and peeled back her eyelids forcibly. First one, then the other. ‘
Madre mia!
’ He slapped her face. ‘Both at once, open!’

She did, and squinting through the painful blue shades of yester-century, Mira saw a whaling ship bearing down on her with its harpoon pointed her way. A whale in the estuary! Nowhere to go! The ship fired, just as the hump breached the surface beneath Mira. The ghostly barb speared towards her and she screamed, clenching her eyes shut and struggling to pull away from her invisible captors.

‘It hurts!’ she pleaded. ‘Please don’t make me? I need my shades.’

‘Do the glasses help?’ Gregan asked. ‘… with these controls on the side?’

Mira worried about how to answer that, since lying to him meant also lying to herself, and without her vigilance in clinging to the truth all these years, she felt sure she’d have lost her grip on reality and gone insane.

‘They’re broken. Any shades will do, really, but purple is best. My skin is very sensitive. I can tell the lights are on in here, so I need a dark shade or I’m no use to anybody.’

‘You see with your skin?’

‘Basically, doesn’t everyone to a certain extent? The eye is just a different type of skin cell.’

After an awkward moment of silence, she felt the glasses return to her face, also returning a small measure of relief.

‘Now tell me how you do what you do? How you see truth?’

She shook her head. ‘I told you. I look and I sense.’

‘Then to business. A test question: tell me what I had for breakfast today, yesterday and last Sunday.’

‘I can’t answer that
here
. I’d need to go there — to each place if there was more than one. You’d need to take me.’

‘But you can tell me the truth from the places you’ve been today?’

‘Only some of it — the parts I recall or lived through myself. I don’t study every yesterday of every place I ever go. I’d never get anywhere.’

‘Very well, then. This gels with the sales pitch from Colonel Kitching. So let’s jump straight to the big question for today. Did my son ask you to spy on me?’

Mira chewed on her lip, worrying about his reaction if she told the truth. ‘What does that matter now?’

‘Because I’m not as dead as you think!’ The voice sent a chill down her spine, as if she’d finally met a real ghost.

‘Get him away from me! If I tell the truth, he’ll kill me!’

‘Lying bitch!’ Greggie screamed, grabbing her by the throat. ‘I have nothing to fear. I’ll choke the truth out of you!’

‘Get off her!’ Lockman shouted, going wild at the same time. ‘Let her go!’ But the result was the opposite, with many hands grappling to grab her or drag her free, while also trying to drag Lockman and Greggie apart. She felt Gabby’s body slide away from her lap too, and Gregan himself leap away to safety, leaving Mira to strain against the rope that tied down her hand to the chair, with the chair itself rocking against its bolts to the deck.

Patterson and Cinq finally dragged Greggie off her, while she heard Uno and a few others struggling to keep a hold of Lockman a short distance away. Mira gasped and coughed, catching her breath.

‘That dog is trouble,’ Gregan warned. ‘If you can’t put him down yet, at least chain him.’

‘I was just about to suggest the same for your son,’ Patterson replied. ‘So I will, if you will.’ An awkward silence endured briefly, broken by shuffling and complaints, mostly from Greggie, and then Mira felt a slice of rough rope pulling Lockman’s wrists against hers, binding them together through the seat, and from there to the deck.

Gregan resumed his seat beside her, ordering one of his men to ensure that Pobody navigated the cat north after leaving the estuary. Then he stroked her hair again. ‘I apologise for the interruption, my dear. Please answer the question.’

She chewed on her lip, wondering if he really did want the truth or like most staff at psychiatric hospitals, just something that would keep him happy and feeling safe in himself.

‘If you can’t trust family, who can you trust?’ she asked, recalling Greggie had said the same thing, as if driven to madness by it.

‘Indeed. Can I trust my own flesh and blood, Miss Chambers?’

‘Tell him the truth,’ Lockman said. ‘If he’s weak, it will break him.’

Mira heard another fist slug into Lockman and felt it herself through the chair.

‘Will you please stop volunteering as their punching bag?’ she pleaded. ‘I can handle this.’

‘I’m not going to hurt you,’ Gregan said patiently. ‘I’ve paid millions as a security deposit to ensure that I don’t. Clearly, Colonel Kitching wants you back in one piece at the end of my week. But I don’t owe anything on any of
them
. I’m paying for the truth, so it’s the truth I’ll get, or I’ll take it out on them. Or perhaps return you to the colonel for correctional treatment. Are we clear?’

‘As glass,’ she replied. ‘But if you don’t like what you hear, you can’t blame me or my friends. You must promise not to vent your reactions on us.’

‘I promise nothing. I place blame where blame’s due, and if that’s you, then your friends may need to suffer the consequences in your place. As I said, I’m not permitted to harm you.’

Mira gulped, fearing harm to her friends far more than to herself. ‘You framed Ben for murder and robbery,’ she reminded him, ‘and he’d been loyal to your family store as a friend as well as an employee.’

‘That was my son’s idea. By the time I heard about the frame-job, there was no going back on it.’

‘For you, Pops!’ Greggie shouted. ‘I did it for you and for us, for the family!’

Mira shook her head, suspecting another web of lies was being spun over there in the shadows, but the details of the aftermath no longer mattered now that she knew the facts of the robbery itself and could ensure that the long process of clearing Ben’s name could begin and succeed — if only they could get away.

‘Tell me!’ Gregan insisted.

Mira sighed. ‘Greggie will betray you first chance he gets.’

‘No
speculating
,’ Gregan warned. ‘Just the facts. After the fire, my son called to brag that he’d found you. I recall you were shouting abuse at him at the time in the background. However, it soon became clear that he didn’t bring you to me by a direct route, and during the detour, you escaped. Or so he says. It’s possible he let you go in exchange for your cooperation.’

Mira laughed. ‘Trust me, that never occurred to him! It might have worked, actually.’

‘Then tell me exactly what happened, everything he said, while you were in his company.’

‘You mean aside from his crude attempt to breed with me?’ She felt Lockman’s wrist tense against the ropes, and clasped his hand, hoping to reassure him that she was okay and keep him from getting hurt again.

‘Crude but shrewd,’ Gregan replied, defensively. ‘You’re too expensive to rent regularly except for special projects — like digging up dirt on a few bank managers and currency exchange agents. If your talent is genetic, a child or two could prove quite profitable in the long term.’

‘Bastards!’ Lockman swore, earning himself another slug to the gut.

‘Hey, I can feel that!’ Mira complained. ‘If you want to punish him, just slap me, okay?’

‘What else?’ Gregan said, undaunted.

Mira chewed on her lip. Waves began to slap the hull as she sensed the ship gliding from sheltered waters into choppy waves. A ghostly fishing trawler sailed through her, and she glimpsed a dozen soldiers inside, working at surveillance screens where she’d expected to see storage crates.

‘He wanted me to discover your passwords, and the code to your safe and all the contact details he’d need so he could move up in your organisation. He told me he wanted to take over from you; that he’d been upset with you for years, feeling unappreciated — even held back by you deliberately — but it’s not just what he said. It’s how he said it. If I was allowed to speculate, I’d say he was planning to kill you if you didn’t finally promote him.’

‘Kill me?’ Gregan wailed. ‘My own flesh and blood? That’s what
they
said!’

‘A moment of madness!’ Greggie sobbed. ‘I had no choice, Pops! You gave me no choice! I’m a laughing stock among your men. It’s so
humiliating
! You say you trust family first, but then you make me work harder for everything! I’m the one who saved the scam after Uncle Theo died, and yet I get no cut or benefits. You don’t even let me step up when you go away a few days on business.’

‘Oh, my son!’ Gregan cried, leaving Mira for him. ‘I’ve never seen it that way. I thought you
wanted
to work your way up. We must fix this. We must fix it together at once — with this trip!’

‘Oh, great,’ Lockman muttered. ‘Now they’re united.’

Freddie clung to the passenger seat of his angel’s Volkswagen, feeling the pitch and yaw of the trawler’s deck amidships being distorted through her car’s suspension. His music stick hung around his neck, humming and trembling like a gagged hostage, and feeding the silent scream of music into the basilar membranes of his inner ear. Sound waves splashed against sound waves, negating each other, leaving him with only a fraction of the cacophony to process; the most frightening the echoes from the future that were most likely to happen.

He could hear the trouble coming — hear his angel’s screams brought to him across the waters in ripples of time as they sailed nearer. Yet there she sat behind the wheel with such a Mona Lisa smile on her face, worried for Ben and Mira, while drawing small pleasures from simple moments, staring at the streaming rain on her windscreen and occasionally switching on the wipers to peer across the stormy waters of the bay.