Surrender (21 page)

The house search was undoubtedly just for my benefit, but I was grateful for his committed performance. I told him he was welcome to stay in the house rather than in his car but he declined, saying he was better out there. It was one of those ambiguous remarks I would normally question, but not this time. I was keen to climb into bed and sleep. I offered him anything he might like to take from the fridge, but he didn’t seem tempted by week-old milk and a couple of suspect jars of pickles. Clearly a fussy eater.

As he headed down the path to his car, I locked the front door behind him just like he’d told me to, and even double-checked the back door to make sure it too was bolted. The bedroom seemed very empty without Wolf. It’s a sad state of affairs when it’s your dog
you miss from your bedroom and not a man. And in thinking that, I realised I missed Robbie. How was it possible to miss him when I’d never had him? Well, that’s just the way it is, I guess.

In the bathroom I changed into my favourite old pyjamas and carefully brushed my teeth, avoiding the cracked cuspid and split lip, and all the time making sure I didn’t catch sight of myself in the mirror.

The bedroom window was covered in Wolf’s slobber and scratches from his frenzy at the sight of Ross attacking me. I’d need to replace the curtains some time too — the bottoms had been shredded by his claws and teeth. Outside I could see Ryan was settled back in his car, chomping down on his packet of biscuits. He gave me a friendly little wave and I waved back, before pulling the curtains closed.

I gulped a glass of delicious water, filled a one-litre bottle from the tap for beside the bed, collected up the cordless phone, and listened to my messages while I climbed in between the cool, fresh sheets. There was only the one message from Smithy telling me the John Doe skull Robbie had dropped off was completely intact and showed no signs of bullet holes or blows from either blunt or sharp objects. On the strength of that and his fuller examination of the rest of the remains, he was calling it an accidental death. He waffled on uncomfortably for a while, admitting how worried he’d been about me, and ended by saying he looked forward to seeing my lovely frowning face again as soon as I was feeling better. He even offered to take me out to dinner which, given my impressions about his latest diet craze, I wouldn’t be in a rush to take him up on.

Actually, hearing his stumbling but clearly genuine words of concern, I had to fight the urge to weep. I was afraid that if I started I might never stop. The messages Robbie had left the night I was
abducted were gone, in fact there were no messages before this one of Smithy’s. Robbie must have erased them. That was okay. I didn’t want to hear his worried voice asking where I was. I didn’t want to be taken back to that night in any way, shape or form. I was just about to put the phone down on the bedside table when it rang, loud enough to make me jump and my entire body flush with fright. It was Robbie.

His voice was calm, and he managed not to sound accusing as he explained that he’d phoned the hospital to check on how I was and been surprised to hear I’d signed myself out. He didn’t give me a hard time about it, and I was immensely, pathetically grateful for that. Again I felt that damn crying thing coming on, and had to bite my bottom lip to stop it happening — unwise, given the cracked condition it was in.

In the silence, Robbie apologised for having Wolf at his place and offered to bring him over. I managed to say it was okay, and explained that I had a policeman parked outside the house keeping an eye on me, and since there were only a couple of hours until sunrise I reckoned I was fine. The truth was, I badly needed to sleep. I’d been knocking back painkillers every thirty minutes or so, and they’d left me more than a little light-headed. I wouldn’t have been surprised if an entire herd of wildebeest wearing techni-coloured nighties had wandered into the bedroom. I might have overdone the painkillers a bit.

I could feel myself drifting, and it was most pleasurable. Robbie told me he’d received an email about the John Doe notebook and tie we’d found. He’d put a photo of them up on the police website, and a woman had emailed to say she knew who the items belonged to. Robbie had arranged to meet her and thought I might like to come with him. At least I think Robbie said all this, but given my painkiller count I may have dreamed it. Either way, Robbie’s voice
was like warm candle wax in my ear. I must have fallen asleep with the phone still attached to it.

I lurched awake with that awful, heart-thumping knowledge I’d been woken by a sound. What was it? What had I heard? I lay completely still, listening intently. The loudest sound was my breathing. I could hear the scratching of a kowhai branch on the bathroom window. That wasn’t what had woken me. I knew that sound. It was so familiar I usually just zoned it out.

The fridge made a low humming noise, and the house creaked as old houses do, particularly in Wellington where there’s always wind. Nothing. Just the thudding of my heart. A lone dog barked in the distance. Still nothing. I’d almost convinced myself I’d imagined the noise when I heard it again. This time I knew immediately what it was — the squeak of a rubber-soled shoe on wooden floorboards. And I knew exactly where the sound came from — the hall outside my bedroom.

Someone was in the house, walking very slowly towards me. Ross. This had to be Ross. But how the hell had he got past Ryan? Given the amount of drug overdosage I’d engaged in it was hard to tell how long I’d been asleep. It felt like five minutes, but from the faint blur of light through the curtains I suspected at least a couple of hours had passed and it was now very early dawn.

I knew I had to move fast or I’d freeze and not be able to move at all. If I could make it to the window I’d only have to pull the curtains back and wave at Ryan, and I knew he’d be in like a shot. Unless, of course, he’d fallen asleep. Another creak from the hallway, closer this time to the bedroom door, almost had me losing my nerve. I thanked the gods I’d closed the bedroom door. It’s not something I usually do. I slid out of bed and, keeping my body low to the floor, ran in a crouch across the room to the window. In one movement I stood to my full height and yanked the curtain open.

Ryan’s car was gone. I couldn’t believe it. Ryan had driven off, abandoned me, and now Ross was in the house. There was no way I could wrestle the window open and escape — I’d accidentally painted it shut the previous summer and had never got around to fixing it.

There was no time to whimper. No time to let fear take over. I crouched again, listening hard, and keeping a close watch on the little gap under the closed door. The security light over the back porch threw a faint light down the length of the hall, and I knew I’d see the shadow of feet when Ross was directly outside the bedroom door. If my hearing was accurate I figured that last creak I’d heard put him maybe half a dozen steps away from the door.

Another creak, and my stomach turned to ice. Between me and the door there was nothing that even vaguely resembled a weapon — there wasn’t even a photo on the wall that I could smash him over the head with. Cautiously, I edged my way along the wall towards the door, figuring I could at least hide behind it. It wasn’t the greatest plan I’d ever had, but it was
a
plan and it kept my brain ticking as I figured out if I could reach the door before he did. My fingertips brushed the Gib board as I crept along the wall, the soft
tsk
of my bare feet sounding as loud as gunshots to me.

Hanging on the back of the door was a terry-cloth dressing gown. I used it to wipe the sweat from my face as I flattened my back against the wall. Optimistically, I searched the dressing gown’s oversized pockets, but there was nothing except an old scrunched-up tissue. The door handle slowly turned. My only hope was that he’d push the door wide open and wouldn’t see me tucked in behind it. If Ross turned around and saw me, I was done for. I looked at the dressing gown still clutched in my hands. If I moved fast enough, then maybe, just maybe, with the element of surprise on my side, I could bring him to ground. Though the dressing gown was one of
those luxurious deep-pile numbers, it was probably not quite fluffy enough to stop a bullet, and I assumed Ross was still carrying his Browning semi-auto. If I could land him so his body was between me and the gun, I might have a chance. Not a very big one, but right now I’d take any chance I could get.

The door started to open. I pressed my back against the wall, planted my bandaged feet apart for balance, clutched my dressing gown at the ready, and held my breath. The door opened.

B
y my reckoning Ross was a good six foot and weighed in at about 170 pounds. He didn’t look all that fit but he was solid, and I knew from experience that he delivered a dirty punch with plenty of force behind it — which is why I was proud of myself for bringing him to ground so easily. Admittedly I had surprise on my side. I jumped him from behind, threw the dressing gown over his head, and leapt on his back in one single, painful, ungraceful movement. Now here he was pegged to the ground with me on his back pummelling his head into the floorboards, and his only resistance was a bit of half-hearted leg and arm flailing.

Niki used to put up a stronger fight than this when we play-fought, and she’d been a lot younger and lighter than Ross. Something was wrong here. I stopped thumping his head against the floor and pulled the dressing gown back. There was enough cold, blue, early morning light for me to see quite clearly that this was someone younger and skinnier than Ross. Someone who didn’t know how to fight.

I flipped him over. It was Stoke. His nose was flattened and
bloodied and he was having trouble breathing, but I had little sympathy for him.

‘Get off! Get off me! I can’t breathe!’ he gasped.

I shifted my weight from his chest to his stomach. Even that concession wasn’t enough to stop his grizzling about me trying to kill him.

He was starting to look a bit waxy, so I eased my weight off a little more.

‘What the hell are you doing here?’ I dug my knees into his ribs. ‘Why’d you break into my house, arsehole?’

‘I wasn’t going to rob you,’ he sulked. He clearly felt my house-breaking accusation was an uncalled-for slur on his character. ‘Well, not much. I just wanted, like, something of Bonnie’s. Something of hers I could keep to remember her, type of thing,’ he mumbled. ‘I’d have looked after it.’

I studied him, trying to figure this guy out. Vex had said he was in love with Niki, and a crazy thought was developing in my slowed-down brain.

‘I thought it was a good time to get something, that’s all,’ he said. ‘With you in hospital and that scary bloody dog of yours off with your new cop boyfriend.’ He spent the next couple of minutes coughing, while I waited impatiently, gathering my thoughts.

‘Please,’ he managed between coughs, ‘please, get off of me.’

I wasn’t prepared to sit my butt anywhere lower on his anatomy, so I lifted my weight, but kept my knees angled into his ribs just in case. He was at an obvious disadvantage, prone like this, but even carrying injuries I knew I was in no danger from this guy.

‘The key was just sitting there under the pot plant,’ he whined, which sounded like the old ‘you were asking for it’ argument to me. Normally I’d have pointed this out, but right now I had more important things on my mind.

‘Why did you want something of Niki’s?’ I asked.

‘She wouldn’t have minded. I’m not saying she owed me or anything like that, but you know, I did get a sort of justice for her …’ He started in on the coughing again, and while he did that, I let the realisation dawn on me. I had to wait until he’d finished that racket before I could ask for confirmation. Really, what a drama queen. A bit of pummelling and head-bashing, and the guy turns into a hypochondriac!

‘You killed Snow, didn’t you,’ I said. It wasn’t a question.

‘Yeah.’ He threw me a bashful smile as if I’d just patted him on the back for a job well done. I wasn’t prepared to go that far, but I did climb off him and offer a hand to help him up. He mistook the gesture and gave me an affable handshake.

‘Get up,’ I said, gruffly. ‘Go fix up your nose while I make us coffee.’

I heard him running the water in the bathroom. I’d never realised before how beautiful the sound of running water is, and I lost thirty seconds of my life listening to the exquisiteness of it. I heard Stoke yelp as he tried to put his nose back into shape, which wasn’t nearly as pleasant a sound as the water. I still couldn’t breathe through my own nose, so I knew what it felt like. Sean’s coffee perc was hooting by the time Stoke entered, looking very sorry for himself. I ignored the look. He settled in at the table, and I put a mug of coffee in front of him. I had a lot of questions and was still trying to figure out which one to open the batting with, but Stoke made it easy by starting right on in.

‘Snow deserved to die for what he did to Bonnie,’ he said, and ducked me a complicit look. ‘I know her name was Niki, eh, but I knew her as Bonnie.’

I nodded my understanding, not wanting to break the spell.

‘That’s why I killed Snow the same way he killed her. I wanted him to feel what she felt.’

He took a sip of his coffee, and I lowered myself into the chair opposite him, keeping my actions slow and quiet like you do with an animal that spooks easily.

‘Vex told me Snow was mouthing off about killing Bon, like he was
the man
, you know?’ he said, blinking rapidly. I couldn’t tell if he was fighting tears or his smashed nose was bothering him. ‘As soon as I found out he’d done it, you know, killed her, I was going to do him straight up, but Vex was like “No, no, you’ll just get into trouble yourself, it’s not worth it,” and all that blah blah and for a while I didn’t do it, and then one day I just like snapped and thought, whoa!’

I had to concentrate to follow his scattergun dialogue with its odd tics, voice impersonations, and half-finished sentences, but the message was clear enough. Stoke had killed Snow as revenge for Niki’s murder.

‘Vex is a cool chick you know, and she really loved Bon —, I mean Niki.’ He glanced nervously at me, unsure how much about my little sister I knew. I knew a lot more than I did a week ago. ‘Bonnie had a bit of a drug problem, eh.’

It wasn’t a question but I nodded anyway, and he relaxed and took a sip of his coffee.

‘Vex was trying to help her with that,’ he added.

There was no reason I could think of why Stoke would lie, but I wanted to be sure.

‘Tell me how you killed Snow,’ I said, keeping my voice easy, my body relaxed.

Stoke took another sip of coffee, then started right in like he was telling me a bedtime story. ‘Well, first off, I wanted to hear it from the horse’s mouth, so I drove him up to the golf course where she was found, and I asked him straight up, I said, “Did you kill Bonnie?”’ He threw me an apologetic look. ‘I called her Bonnie to
him because that’s what he called her.’

I nodded again and just kept nodding to encourage him to continue. I didn’t trust myself to speak, anyway.

‘He fessed right up. Like Vex said, he was proud of doing it. And I just got like
the frenzy
and I stuck him. I didn’t know until right when I did it that I would, you know,
do
it.’

I remembered Smithy’s ‘frenzied and unexpected’ description of the attack on Snow and made a mental note to tell him he was right.

‘And he struggled a bit, but he was mostly so surprised because he so wasn’t expecting it, and then his mouth opened and shut and he just sort of slumped over, but that was okay because he had his seat belt done up.’ He took an enthusiastic sip of his coffee. ‘So I just drove off.’ He smiled proudly, as if I’d congratulated him. He must have been telepathic.

We sat in silence for a minute.

‘And then you dropped his body out of the car in Cuba Street?’ I offered.

‘Yeah. I meant it like it was a message, leaving him there with the rubbish and all that. That’s what he was, you know? Rubbish.’ He grinned, but then his face fell. ‘But I don’t think anyone got it. And there were recycle bins out, so maybe people thought I meant something like he might come back again or some reincarnation shit or something.’

‘I got the “rubbish” message,’ I said. Well I had!

His face brightened. ‘You did?’ He nodded, pleased with his work. ‘Cool,’ he added, rubbing his hand up and down his thigh and nodding enthusiastically.

We sat in silence for a while. Then, with a surreptitious glance at me, he started up again.

‘I thought it would be, like, cooler than it was. I thought I’d feel something like retro-whatsit.’ He looked to me for help.

‘Retribution,’ I offered.

‘Yeah, retro-bution. I thought I’d feel the retro-bution, but it didn’t work out like that. I didn’t feel, like … righteous.’

He was reliving the moment of Snow’s death. It felt almost pornographic to watch him.

‘But, like, in the end, I don’t have a regret for it. He shouldn’t have done that to Bonnie,’ he said. He drained his coffee, at peace with himself. His personal moral compass had swung in his own favour, and he was content.

‘You loved her, didn’t you? You loved Niki,’ I said.

He used the back of his hand to wipe the coffee grinds from his lips. ‘She didn’t feel that way about me, but that’s okay,’ he explained, simply. ‘I wasn’t in her league.’

I let that sit quietly between us. There was nothing I could say, and he didn’t seem to expect me to contradict him. When a decent interval had passed, I tried another question.

‘Do you have any idea who ordered the hit on Niki?’

He went very still like a dog does when it thinks it’s heard a sound. ‘Snow did it. I thought you knew that,’ he said, confused by my ignorance.

‘I know he was the one who stabbed her,’ I said. ‘But I think someone else paid him to do it. Snow …’ I hesitated, trying to find a way to refer to the recording Gemma made without actually mentioning it. ‘Snow told someone that he was just “the enforcer”, which means someone else was behind it. For a while I thought that someone was Chris Ross. But now, well, now I’m not so sure.’

He studied me for a long time before pushing the empty mug across the table towards me.

‘I don’t know anything about that,’ he said.

‘Snow didn’t say anything? Before you killed him?’

He thought about that before answering. ‘We didn’t talk much,’
he admitted. ‘I just asked him if he did it and he said “Yeah”, and that was about it.’

I poured him a second cup and pushed the sugar bowl closer. He ladled four heaped teaspoons into his cup while I sipped my coffee and thought some more.

‘I’m sure someone was behind her killing,’ I said, but it sounded like I was trying to convince myself. Actually, I was wondering if I’d got stuck in that tunnel vision thing cops always warn about. ‘I just can’t believe Snow would have killed her without good reason. I mean, he was making a lot of money out of Niki’s blackmailing scam. Plus she was paying him for her drugs. It wasn’t in his interest to kill her.’

Stoke didn’t respond. He seemed less concerned by the contradiction in Snow’s motivation than I was. Then again, Stoke had killed the man in revenge for his having killed Niki, so he had more invested in believing in Snow’s singular guilt.

‘He said he hated working for a chick,’ Stoke added, colouring up in anger. ‘He called Bonnie the c word.’ Stoke paused to rein in his anger. ‘But she wasn’t that — she was an angel,’ he summed up with conviction. He said it without a flicker of sarcasm or irony. He said it and he meant it, and I saw that he truly did love her. In every way I could think of Stoke and I were worlds apart, but we both loved Niki and that bonded us. Love of her was the only thing about Niki that lived on. She was gone, gone, gone — but as long as we loved her, some part of her still existed. I loved her. Stoke loved her. We kept her alive. I hunched my body towards him until I’d captured his full attention.

‘You see, Stoke,’ I said, ‘I was thinking that one of the guys Niki was blackmailing — Ross or maybe Richard Brownlee or some other guy that I don’t even know about yet — maybe they decided they’d had enough of being blackmailed by Niki, and offered Snow
more money to kill her than she paid him to work for her.’

I could see Stoke was struggling to keep up with this. He wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer, but in his defence I’d smashed his head around a fair bit, and it was early in the morning. He smiled sheepishly at me, as if he’d failed a spelling test.

‘Nah, I can’t see it,’ he admitted. ‘Sorry.’

Not that I rated Stoke’s opinion all that highly, but I was thinking I must have got it wrong. Maybe there was no one else involved, it had simply been Snow’s idea to kill Niki. I thought back to Gemma’s pretending to hire him to kill her fictitious husband. Snow had described in ghastly detail how he’d killed Niki. He’d made no mention of anyone else’s involvement. In fact he’d been keen to take all the credit himself.

Belatedly, I realised I should have been writing Stoke’s statement down as he talked. I scrabbled around in my bag until I located my notepad and a pen. Stoke was studying me. I could see he was working up the courage to ask something.

‘What?’

‘What happened to you?’ he asked. ‘Your face and shit.’

‘It’s a long story,’ I said. I flicked through the GST workings and shopping lists looking for the first empty page on which to write Stoke’s statement. The last page I’d written on was from the night I’d made notes while talking to the Bookends at the strip club. That was on the very first night — the same day I’d heard from Sean that Snow had been murdered. I read what I’d written and let out a little yelp of surprise. Stoke looked at me expectantly.

‘You’re coming with me,’ I told him.

It said a lot about Stoke that he didn’t ask where we were going. It said even more about him that he looked quite happy to be going there.