Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone

CHAPTER 22

I caught up to Sofia in the foyer, standing by the entranceway.

‘Someone’s sniffing around the maintenance shed,’ she said. She pushed open the double doors, the storm cascading over the threshold, ice spattering my boots. I hesitated, but she herded me outside. The porch was empty. Even the husbands had given up their retrieval missions, choosing to be warm and chastened over shivering and chivalrous. The wind rippled in my ears; it sounded like someone scrunching cellophane beside me. Sofia had to shout to be heard. ‘I saw a shadow.’ She hesitated. ‘From the bar.’

‘So?’ I yelled back. It was all I could get out with the wind barrelling into my mouth. It was the type of gale you have to take bites of to breathe.

‘Don’t the bad guys like to hang around the scene of the crime?’

She was right, but my cowardice activates at quite a low temperature threshold. I was about to suggest that we wait a minute or, better yet, fetch Crawford, but before I could form a word, she’d slung one arm over her brow and powered into the storm.

I gave chase, worried if she got too far her shadow would dissolve. Almost immediately it was impossible to tell what was up and what was down. For all I knew we could have gone the wrong way, downhill, and been traipsing across the frozen lake, about to plunge through the fragile ice to our deaths. I’ve read that once you hit cold water, your lungs seize up. If it’s cold enough, it even affects your blood. You can black out immediately. Everyone knows that going into a frozen lake is dangerous, because once you go through a hole in the ice it’s impossible to find it again from the underside, but the old cliché of the drowning person banging their fists against the clear ice isn’t real. Everything stops in water that cold. What a disappointment that must be, to be robbed of the fist-bashing. I hope, when I go, I get the chance to rage against my death.

I realised I’d lost Sofia. I tried to look around. Nothing but swirling, endless grey. The howl in my ears was violent, nearly shrieking. The wind sounded like a chainsaw. My eyes stung, so I buried them further in the crook of my elbow, trying to look up only when I had to. I took a few shuffling steps forward. Hulking shapes emerged from the swirling grey. Bears. That was my first thought, which was ridiculous, because this was Australia. They were cars, I quickly realised. I was in the car park. Good; I’d been going the right way.

The storm was so vicious the cars were literally rocking on their suspensions. Katherine’s Volvo had a broken window, snow caked on the back seat. It was lucky that wasn’t Marcelo’s car, I thought, where the snow would have soiled the leather seats and short-circuited the fancy electronics. I had an idea, filed it for later.

From where I stood, I thought I could just make out the maintenance shed, further up the hill. It was too far to be a vehicle, too real to be a bear, and it didn’t have the triangular peak of the chalets. It was good enough to orientate myself. I went to take a step, but then, to my right, I saw Michael’s truck. Despite the blur, it was unmistakable in its size. Both flanks were practically acting as sails in the driving wind, and the whole thing was rocking recklessly on its small wheels, as if it could tip at any moment. I felt the keys in my pocket rub against my leg. Forget the maintenance shed. I took a step towards the truck.

Someone grabbed my arm. Sofia. Her lips against my ear, spit on my neck. ‘Wrong way, Ern.’

Then she was dragging me up the hill, out of the lot. The snow was noticeably deeper already (goodbye crime-scene footprints) and I punched through it up to my calf with each step. As we got closer to the flat-roofed shadow, I could see huge mounds of snow caked on the roof. We approached from the side, even though the front would have been a better wind buffer, battling the last few steps until our backs were pressed against the corrugated iron. The wind split around the shed and reformed just in front of us, like we were sheltering behind a rock in a river, and the crinkle in our ears reduced to a ghostly moan. I took a few heavy gulps of uninterrupted air and shook an inch of powder from my arms and shoulders. I didn’t have gloves on so I shoved my hands in my pockets, clenching and unclenching them to warm them up. Above me, long-fingered icicles hung from the awning. I saw a horror movie once where someone was skewered by a falling icicle, which I knew was impossible, but sucked myself as far back against the wall as I could anyway.

Sofia leaned around the corner, then quickly pulled her head back and elbowed me in the ribs, making eyes at me. Look. The shed door was open. The padlock Crawford had used to seal it was lying in the snow. It hadn’t been cut; the handle he’d looped it through had been entirely pulled off, screws and all.

‘We should get Crawford,’ I said.

‘You go get him then.’ She made to round the corner.

I put an arm across her, flattening her to the wall. ‘Stop!’

‘I want a closer look at the body, okay? And I’m not going to get a better opportunity. Crawford won’t let any of us near it again. And like he’s going to solve it. He may as well be playing dress-up. If this is’—she exploded an imaginary balloon in her hands— ‘something bigger, then we could all be dead by dawn. We have to arm ourselves with knowledge. And here we are and the door’s open. The killer’s probably been and gone.’

‘And if they haven’t?’

‘Well, that’s why I brought you. Bodyguard.’

‘Bad choice.’

‘How about this? We take a look through the door, just the tiniest glimpse, and if someone’s in there, we barricade it, lock them in. There’s only one entrance. And then we go get everyone else. Capiche?’

I had a lot of questions. How would we lock them in with a broken handle? How was it possible to barricade the door and run for help at the same time? What if they had a weapon? How do you spell capiche?

But I knew I didn’t have a choice. If I went back to the guesthouse for help, Sofia wouldn’t wait for me to arrive with back-up. It was safer together. And, besides, while I hoped that what was in the truck would help clear Michael’s name (Ernest fixes something.), a proper look at the body might help too. And, look, it’s annoying, I know, when people make dumb decisions for this reason – it’s the reason icicle-kebab didn’t survive that horror flick – but I was, just a bit, curious.

We rounded the corner, edged along the wall, backs pressed for both stealth and icicle safety until we reached the crack in the door. Sofia leaned her head through the gap, then pulled back like she’d been bitten by a snake, her eyes wide. She mouthed, ‘Someone’s there.’ I pointed at the door, mimed closing it. She shook her head, pointed at my eyes and then the gap in the doorway, and shuffled past me so I was closest to it. She gave me a push. Her intent was clear: you need to see this. I bugged my eyes at her in as close to an expression of betrayal as I could figure: this wasn’t the plan. She gave me another push.

I took a deep breath, resisted the urge to cast one more spiteful look at Sofia, and poked my head through the gap.

Green Boots was where we’d left him, limbs splayed on the too-small stack of pallets, chest thrust up like he was inverted skydiving. The difference now was that someone was hunched over him. I recognised them immediately, even from the back. They were focused on the body, so they hadn’t noticed us yet. Ideally, here is when I would have slowly backed away, locked them in and fetched the real police, as agreed. But I didn’t. It was as if some invisible thread was pulling me into the room. I barely felt Sofia’s frantic tapping on my arm, her warning hiss swept away in the wind.

My entrance was unnoticed, the rattling of the walls and the groan of the roof, snow still piling up on it, masking my footsteps. It was freezing inside the shed, the cold pushing in from the metal walls and up from the concrete floor. My breath misted. I cleared my throat. The person shot upright, took two steps back from the body and put their hands in the air. Red-handed.

‘Nice things,’ I said. It’s a private joke we have.

CHAPTER 23

The reason I say ‘Nice things’ to Erin so often is, as I told her when we married, if she was ever mad at me, she could always answer the question ‘How are things with Ernest?’ honestly with: ‘Well, he always says “nice things”.’

Her shoulders crumpled, her hands came down and she said, ‘Oh, thank God,’ in a huge breath of relief, breaking out into a wider smile than I’d seen her give in a long time. She started to move towards me, but stopped when she heard the steel in my voice.

‘What are you doing here, Erin?’

‘Have you talked to Michael yet?’ Her tone was unexpected, a mixture of confusion and surprise, as if everything should have been, after my cryptic adversarial conversation with my brother, pretty straightforward. ‘Did he tell you about Alan?’

‘He told me about Alan.’

‘Okay. So . . .’ Again, she paused as if she’d filled in enough of the blanks, before realising she had to really spell it out, putting on her gentle teacher’s voice. ‘How do you feel about it?’

‘I don’t know what I believe.’ There was no point lying to Erin; she was always better at it than me. I know, I know – it sounds like a pithy remark to put in a book where she has no right of reply, but it is true. Besides, she was the one who had the affair.

‘There’s a dead man next to us,’ she said bluntly.

‘You know, I’d noticed.’

‘This wasn’t an accident, Ern, like the resort owner wants us to believe. That’s just so everyone doesn’t panic. But you and I, we know that this is a Cunningham problem. Brought here by Cunninghams . . .’ She didn’t say it, but the rest of the sentence lingered: committed by Cunninghams.

I relented slightly. ‘If I believe Michael, the man who killed my father, Alan, is already dead. That story’s finished. What else is there?’

‘If?’

‘I believe he believes it – that’s it for now.’

The memory of the webbed clearing chilled me. Perhaps that was part of my refusal to accept what Michael had told me: Alan might seem villainous on paper, but I was the only one there that morning and I didn’t want his death, his murder, to be justified – no matter who he was or what he’d done.

‘It’s simple, though. Alan killed your father to cover his arse, sure, but he was killing for something.’ Erin clicked her tongue as she processed everything. ‘Then he tries to sell that same thing to Michael, and that gets us here.’

‘Michael told me that already. But why wait so long?’

‘Maybe because Alan’s career was gone. Maybe he was desperate. All I know is, if it was worth killing over half a lifetime ago, it’s worth killing over now.’ She gestured with a thumb at Green Boots. ‘Need I, again, point to the aforementioned corpse?’

‘Okay then. What was this information Michael was buying from Alan?’

‘I don’t know.’ She hesitated. ‘He wouldn’t tell me. Said it wasn’t safe.’

Rule 9 dictates I must divulge everything as it occurs to me, and here it occurred to me that she was telling the truth, but she wasn’t telling me everything.

‘But?’ I fished.

‘We dug something up.’

I thought of his prison-filthy hands, as we’d shaken in front of the guesthouse. The dirt under his fingernails. The rest of him had been clean: clean shaven, dyed hair. Why hadn’t he cleaned his nails? ‘Is it in the back of the truck?’

She nodded.

‘Okay. So what is it?’ It sounded simple when I put it like that, which made me feel like it might have been true. ‘Money, I assume, to be worth that much? Something from one of the Sabres’ robberies? Jewellery? Drugs?’

‘I thought so too. I haven’t seen it.’

I laughed. It came out a hack, my vocal cords not fully defrosted. ‘All this over a treasure map?’

‘You shouldn’t laugh.’ She folded her arms. ‘I trust him.’

The word ‘trust’ hummed with double meaning. Like it could be taken out of the sentence and replaced with something else.

‘Is this because of—’

‘Don’t do this, Ern. It’s not about that.’

It wasn’t and it was. I’d never confronted her this directly before, even in marriage counselling. My anger was always stoppered by shame and grief. But if I had, we might have got past it; we might have sat down and talked it through, about what starting a family meant to each of us and what the fertility letter, which I’d opened over breakfast, had done to us. To the family we’d been trying to create.

We’d been waiting a long time for the letter. It’s strange to put such life-changing news in the post, but I suppose they considered it mundane enough to bypass a phone consult. The letter itself had been slow to come, Erin wringing her hands as she gave me each piece of bad news: the first letter had been a victim of an address mix-up that she’d had to call the clinic to fix and the second, weeks later, a soggy illegible pulp, destroyed in the rain. Erin had taken it hard. Every day she’d been first out to the letterbox in the morning, flicking through the pizza vouchers and real estate introductions as she walked up the drive, shaking her head: another day without the results.

I still have the letter, actually. It’s crumpled from my tightened grip that morning, as I’d gazed at my results in disbelief, trying to figure out a way in which they told a different story. When Erin had come into the kitchen, pinning tendrils of loose hair behind her ears, I had the letter smoothed down next to the butter. My arm was dirty, foul liquid on my wrist. I asked her to sit down, and the look on her face when she really looked at me, when she read it . . . I think we both knew it was probably the end of us. We’d cling on for a while, but the flint was gone. If I’d still had it, I would have used it to burn that damn letter.

We’d stayed in each other’s orbit for another eighteen months, because we didn’t want to go and we didn’t want to stay. That’s what happens in a marriage, when one of you wants a child and one of you can’t give it to them.

Yes, that was my life’s third and final eventful breakfast. The one that has to do with sperm.

‘So it’s real?’ I asked. We both knew what I meant. Her and Michael.

She sighed. ‘It’s real. But I’d believe him even if it wasn’t. Not all of us get to see our father in a new light. That’s a privilege.’

I understood then that, through helping Michael understand Robert better, she was vicariously seeking closure about her own abusive father.

‘Come on,’ I begged. ‘You’re smarter than this.’

‘You always did say such nice things.’ She smiled grimly. ‘Have you opened the truck yet?’

I shook my head. ‘He gave me the keys. But then we followed you up here.’

‘He told me whatever’s in there should convince you.’

I wished people would stop telling me that whatever was in the truck was going to change my life. It would, as it turns out, in terms of both what I believed and the function of my right arm, but I still wished they’d stop telling me.

‘We’re getting nowhere,’ I said, deciding to defuse things. ‘Let’s try to find some common ground.’

‘You sound like Doctor Kim.’

‘We spent all that money on the counselling – who’d have thought it would come in handy.’ I forced a smile.

‘So, what is it then?’ She put on our former therapist’s languid monotone. ‘What unites us?’

‘Neither of us believe that Michael is responsible for . . .’ I gestured to the body. It seemed odd to be having such a casual conversation around it. ‘And I’m guessing if you’re willing to break in and poke around, you don’t buy the natural causes explanation either. You think someone’s after Michael, after what you both dug up, and I’m just trying to get Michael off the hook and fix something for once in my life. That’s our common ground. We’re both trying to solve a murder.’ Once again I am reminded that I am not the main character simply by virtue of being the one who writes this all down. In fact, I remember thinking to myself at the time that more people seemed to have motives to solve this damn murder than to actually commit it. ‘So let’s start there. If we can find who did this, we’ll also find out if Michael’s telling the truth.’

‘One proves the other,’ she agreed, then she touched her pointer fingers together, placed them under her chin and furrowed her brow. ‘I’m feeling there’s been some progress in the room today. Wouldn’t you say?’

Against my instincts, I laughed. There was a reason we fell in love, no matter what had happened since; it was hard to forget all of that.

‘You got a bit of a look before I arrived,’ I said. ‘Did you find anything?’

‘I mean, I’m no expert, but none of this can be normal.’ She leaned back over the body, I edged closer.

I hadn’t had a good look at Green Boots yet, as I’d been too squeamish when carrying his foot and only glimpsed Crawford’s photo of his face. His eyes were closed. The shed was so cold his hair had ice crystals in it. His face was caked in black ash, which I’d first mistaken for frostbite, and around his mouth it had formed a glistening, congealed tar. His neck was ringed with an angry red wound. Sofia had told me about the cut; it had rubbed off on Crawford’s sleeves, but it was gorier up close. Whatever had been wrapped around the man had been so tight as to cut through the skin. The bloody laceration had also started to crystallise in the cold.

Erin interrupted my sleuthing. ‘Looks like someone strangled him. I don’t know what the black stuff is. Poison?’

‘Ash,’ I said, repeating what Sofia had told me. ‘Apparently.’

‘As in he was on fire? Out here?’

I nodded. ‘No melted snow though. And if he was, wouldn’t he have rolled around? Had burns? Sofia thinks it’s a serial killer. The media calls them the Black Tongue. But if you think Michael’s caught up in some gangland dealings, same as Dad, it might be some kind of enforcer?’

‘Maybe. It seems quite violent, and I suppose people only do that if they either want something to really hurt or to send a message. Backtrack for me, though . . . you’re saying this is ash, but the snow wasn’t melted. This killer sets them on fire without setting them on fire?’

‘It’s an ancient torture technique once used by Persian kings, actually,’ Sofia said from the doorway. ‘What? I was freezing my arse off.’

‘Torture?’ I raised an eyebrow at Erin. ‘Fits with sending a message.’

‘How much does she know?’ Erin folded her arms. ‘Michael told me to only trust you.’

‘She’s okay. She knows about the money.’

‘It’s too bad Ern’s already spent’—Sofia shot me a sly glance—‘a fair chunk of it. At least fifty kay, right?’

Erin fixed me with a look that I couldn’t decipher. It was either annoyance that I’d spent Michael’s money, or that I’d become close enough to Sofia to tell her my secrets. I settled on the second, thinking it was a bit rich from someone who’d spent last night with my brother. ‘You seem to know an awful lot about this serial killer,’ Erin said, still wary.

If Sofia thought she was being accused, she didn’t show it. ‘We had a victim through one of our hospitals. The Humphreys woman. Someone found her, and everyone thought they’d got her just in time. But her lungs were shot – we had to switch the ventilators off. I found it interesting, listened to a few podcasts. Didn’t really think I’d need the information until, well, ever. But here we are.’

‘Well, close the case. If you listened to a podcast . . .’

‘Give her a chance, Erin. She knows more than we do.’

‘So we’re looking for a history buff? With a taste for medieval torture?’

‘Kind of.’ Sofia looked embarrassed. ‘I didn’t make this up, okay? It’s called suffocation by ash. Ernie, I told you before that most people who die in house fires don’t burn to death, they asphyxiate. That’s partly because fire pulls oxygen out of the air, so there’s nothing to breathe, but even after the fire is out, if you breathe in too much smoke it can coat your lungs so that you couldn’t get oxygen out of the air even if it were there.’

‘And ancient Persia is known for its house fires?’ I asked.

‘Very funny. They’re the ones who started the torture – they had a specially built tower for it, huge, more than twenty metres high. It was filled with wheels and cogs and things, and at the bottom, a pile of ashes. They would push a blasphemer into it – because that’s what got you the death penalty back in those days. Now, being trapped in a room full of dormant ashes is not going to do much to hurt you, so they’d turn the wheels and these giant cogs would start stirring the ash into the air. The criminal would suffocate to death.’

‘Lucy told me that the first victims were an elderly couple from Brisbane? She looked them up. You’re saying that happened to them?’

‘She’s right. And, well, not really. Obviously there’s not a three-storey torture tower hidden up here somewhere and, anyway, Green Boots seems to have been strangled.’ Sofia picked up a screwdriver from a nearby bench and used it to push down Green Boots’ collar for a better view. ‘With the density of the ash on his cheeks, and the depth of the wound in his neck, I’d say he had a bag with ash pulled over his head, tied tightly, and then removed post-mortem.’

‘The snow looked like someone had run back and forth in a small area,’ I said.

‘Exactly. Lack of oxygen disorientates you very quickly – he would have been trying to take the bag off, likely panicking. I can picture him frantically running in circles.’

‘That’s not so medieval.’ Erin realised she’d said it too sharply and raised her hands in apology. ‘I’m not trying to be sarcastic, sorry – I’m interested. I’m just thinking that anyone can strangle someone, put a bag over their head. Why bother with the ash?’

‘I agree. I’m guessing the killer was in a pinch, rushed. Maybe by daylight coming on. Maybe another resort guest interrupted them. With that Brisbane couple, the killer took their time. I told you it wasn’t a torture tower, but it was, sort of, a modern incarnation of one. They were found locked in their car, in their garage, their hands zip-tied to the steering wheel. There were indentations on the roof, as if someone had stood on it, and a leaf-blower discarded on the floor. The killer would have poured the ash in through the sunroof and stuck the leaf-blower down afterwards to stir it up. It was the same with the lady who came through our ER. Zip-tied, in a locked toilet with the window and fan taped shut, except for something to put the blower through. That’s the way they like to do it. Slowly. This is all conjecture, obviously.’

‘From a podcast,’ Erin affirmed.

‘From a podcast.’

‘It must feel like drowning in the air,’ I said. I wouldn’t wish my dreams of choking on anyone, and I’d been unconscious for most of my time in my mother’s car as a child. I’d read of divers drowning within inches of the surface, feeling if they could just break through the water they’d be saved, but it being just, just, out of reach. I couldn’t imagine trying to breathe the air in front of you and getting nothing from it. ‘If you think it’s the same killer, you think it’s the same equipment, right? It’s not just the ash that got you thinking. You think the mark on his neck could be made from a zip-tie?’

‘I do. It’s cut into the flesh cleanly enough to be something plastic, rather than rope, which would tear the skin a bit, and if it was fishing wire, it would be a deeper cut. But here, look . . .’ She pointed at the corpse’s mouth, which was slightly open, took out her phone (battery: 85%) and shone the flashlight in. It was no mystery why the media had dubbed the killer the Black Tongue; the dead man’s mouth was caked with black charcoal, making his tongue a thick black slug behind his smeared teeth. ‘It’s more ornamental, rather than the cause of death. The bag would have done the job of suffocation anyway. This serves no purpose other than to leave a mark.’

‘Why would he do that?’ Erin asked.

‘I’ve seen my share of weird shit in the ER, so I can guess at a few reasons. You know what I’m thinking Ern, I’ll bet. You write this stuff. What’s the basic principle of a psycho killer’s MO?’

‘Well,’ I said. ‘I suppose the most common assumption is that psychopaths just need to do things a certain way. It’s a part of their process – it means something to them. But if it were that important, I don’t think they’d put the effort into killing without all their affectations in order, unless they were interrupted. It wouldn’t be worth it. And it’s not like someone’s building bonfires up here. That would be pretty obvious. So I don’t know how that helps.’

‘You don’t need fire as much as you might think, actually – the trick is just to get those particles in the air. And you can buy ash in big bags from any garden or hardware store. My point is, they probably brought it with them. They were prepared. So my second theory is, I think, more likely.’

My stomach sank as I deduced what she was about to say, and how well it sat with Erin’s and Michael’s theories, but the sound of wrenching metal distracted us as Crawford flung the door open. He was red-faced, sweating, worked into a state. One hand held the broken door handle, padlock still affixed, while the other clutched a heavy policeman’s torch. He looked back and forth between the three of us. His mouth tried to form a couple of different words, but it seemed he could choose nothing to best represent his fury, so he just yelled, ‘Out!’

We filed out like children, heads down, mumbles of ‘Sorry, Officer’ as we went. The storm had died down slightly since we’d arrived, and I could see the guesthouse again, looking more like a gingerbread house than ever: freshly iced.

Crawford tailed us gruffly down the hill. My editor told me it’s impossible for someone to walk gruffly, but they’ve clearly never had Officer Crawford huffing two steps behind them, so I’ll stick with the adverb. I held the truck keys up to Erin, who gave an agreeing nod, as we started towards the parking lot. She then turned to Sofia, whispering so Crawford couldn’t hear.

‘What was your second theory?’

‘The Black Tongue is announcing themselves. They want us to know they’re here.’

CHAPTER 24

The rear of the truck had one of those rippled roller doors that slid into the roof. An empty coffee cup sat on the lip. The key turned easily. I spun the handle ninety degrees. It felt like a big moment, so I paused, looking at the three others who were crowded around. Erin was wringing her hands, anxious to know if this would be enough to win me over, and perhaps for me to tell her what Michael hadn’t. Sofia had adopted a smug pout, looking forward to Michael’s secrets being exposed. Crawford looked impatient. He’d tried in his best, most authoritative voice to demand we head directly to the guesthouse, but I’d figured that he wouldn’t try to stop us with any passion. I’d been right: on being rebuffed, he’d tagged along to make sure we didn’t do anything else stupid. Me? I was preparing to be disappointed. Like I’d told Michael, nothing short of a spaceship would blow me away.

I lifted the door a couple of inches. First observation: it didn’t explode. (I know that sounds crazy, but a lot of scenarios had run through my head, and the whole thing being rigged to blow was, I’m ashamed to admit, one of the least outlandish ones.) I didn’t open it so slowly for suspense: the door was iced in its joints. It took a great heave to open it enough to see even a small slit of the darkness behind it. My gloveless hands felt seared by the icy metal. I went to give it another heave, when a hand on my arm stopped me.

‘Maybe this is just for you,’ Erin said. ‘At first.’

Erin clearly knew something about what was in there. She’d helped Michael dig it up, after all. She thought it was money, or valuables at least, which, based on it needing to be transported by truck, meant there was a lot of it. Michael told me to only trust you. Michael had said the same thing to me directly, that I was the only one he trusted by virtue of me testifying against him. He’d allowed himself to be sequestered in a putrid sock drawer just to give me the keys in private. Sofia and Crawford weren’t supposed to tag along. Erin was right.

‘I need a minute to see for myself.’ I raised my voice above the wind. ‘Um . . . it might not be safe.’

I knew this was thin. Sofia rolled her eyes. I wondered whether she was more annoyed at being excluded or because each time I took Erin or Michael’s side she imagined she was getting further away from a chunk of the money. It occurred to me that it might have been why she’d interrupted us in the maintenance shed when she did: it was conveniently just after Erin and I had found our common ground and started to talk like a team. I expected more resistance from Crawford, for any number of reasons (chain of evidence, witnesses, any semblance of competent police work), but it seemed he’d given up trying to be a cop entirely. Erin shepherded them both around the side of the truck and, with two more frost-cracking heaves, I had the door open.

The air was still so thick with ice and the sky so grey that even open, the inside of the truck wasn’t well lit enough to see all the way into. The walls were lined with the usual ropes and straps for moving furniture. But I could see a very specific shape further back. It looked like a . . .

I couldn’t be sure; I needed a closer look. I clambered into the cabin. The truck squeaked and rocked on its wheels as I walked over to the object. The air was stale and smelled of, of all things, fresh dirt. We dug something up.

My eyes adjusted to the gloom. Out of everything I thought could be in the truck that might speak to both Michael’s innocence and his whereabouts last night, this hadn’t even crossed my mind. I stood stunned for a few seconds, until there was a bash on the flank of the truck. Sofia called, muffled but distinct: ‘Well, what is it?’

I walked to the entrance and slid the door down, sealing myself in the dark. Erin had been right. This was for me, and me alone.

The coffin still had rivers of dirt caked into the joinery. That explained the smell of fresh earth. I examined it with the glow of my phone’s torch (battery: 37%). The coffin looked expensive, made of robust wood, perhaps oak, which was well varnished enough not to have degraded too badly, and it had ornate chrome handles on either side. It didn’t look new, but it didn’t look a hundred years old either. It was hard to tell. Lucy would be pleased: as far as alibis for consummation go, graverobbing was a pretty good one.

My first thought was that this could be Holton’s coffin, purely because I couldn’t figure out who else my brother would have cause to dig up, and it had a nice circular irony that he was the man my brother had tried to bury in the first place. But this was a coffin designed for showing off, for open caskets, for someone loved and respected. Given Michael had told me Alan owed money to half the prison population, I didn’t think anyone would have reached into their pockets to give Holton such a resplendent resting place.

I dragged my fingertips lightly over the wood as I walked the length of it. The truck’s axle creaked as I shifted my weight across the thin metal floor. I saw that a row of nails had been pulled up around the rim of the casket so the lid could open. I realised that this might not be a coffin at all, but a storage box masquerading as one, and perhaps Michael had already taken what he wanted from it. People hide things in coffins, right? But if that were the case and he’d emptied it, why did he need me to see it? And if it was a person, how was I supposed to identify someone who had been in the ground so long? A pile of bones would mean nothing to me, unrecognisable no matter whose they were. As I was thinking all of this, my fingertips brushed against a rough groove on the otherwise polished wood. A marking. I shone my torch (battery: 36%) over it.

An infinity symbol, carved into the wood.

I had a sudden memory. Of a state funeral, an event demanding of a plush coffin. Of a Swiss Army knife, scratching a forever bond into the oak. Of hats held against chests and white gloves and gold buttons. I might have doubted my ability to recognise the bones inside, but I knew this coffin.

Michael and Erin had dug up Alan Holton’s partner: the policeman my father shot.

CHAPTER 25

I knew I had to open it. Pandora be damned.

Lids of coffins are damn heavy: the fancy ones are lead-lined to stop you seeping through the wood as you liquefy and, even without the weight, the joints get warped by moisture and the pressure of six feet of dirt. Rigor mortis of the inanimate. If Michael hadn’t previously forced it open, I wouldn’t have been able to do it on my own. To get it into the truck, he and Erin must have rigged some kind of pulley system out of the moving straps hanging from the walls.

Since I was on my own, I figured out I could shift the lid by standing on the hinge side, leaning over the coffin, hooking my fingers under the rim and pulling back with all my weight. It was quite an effort given the cold: inside the four metal walls, on the mountain, the storage van may as well have been an ice truck. My breath puffed in the freezing air with the effort, as the first few centimetres squeaked open, agonisingly slow until inertia overpowered the weight and the lid shot all the way up, nearly knocking me on my arse and flipping the coffin. Luckily, I didn’t have to tango with a set of bones: the coffin rocked slightly towards me but found balance. The truck groaned again, as if begging me to quit moving around so much.

I shone my phone light (battery: 31%) into the coffin.

The coffin wasn’t empty, which I’d half suspected, so seeing a body came as more of a relief than a shock, because at least it was what was supposed to be there.

Quick science lesson. Thirty-five years is enough, depending on the seal and the coffin’s material, to leave a semi-mummified corpse. It’s not quite enough time for all of the tissue to liquefy, and the bones don’t crumble to dust until nearer the century mark, so the result is a skeleton covered in flaky grey rags of tendon. I didn’t know the science at the time – I had to look it up afterwards to write about it – so I wasn’t sure what Michael hoped I would forensically or intuitively learn from seeing a half-decomposed body. I shook my head at the pointlessness of it all.

Though there still could be something else hidden in there, I figured. Michael surely would have moved anything truly valuable, though I remembered him trying to show me something, patting himself down and swearing as he couldn’t find it. Then again, if it was something small enough to fit in his pocket, why hide it in a large coffin in the first place? And why would Michael bring the whole coffin up here if he’d taken what he needed from it already?

I needed to take a closer look. My torchlight (battery: 31%) fell first on the remnants of a human foot, which, in isolation, looked like a small bird: long thin bones that almost formed a cage. I scanned up the legs, waxy in decomposition, trying to remember enough biology from high school to let me know if anything was amiss. It was messier than any model skeleton I’d seen, the rib cage partly crumbled so it looked like there were extra ribs. There was not a shred of clothing left except for a few gold buttons on the tattered-sail remnants of chest strung over the ribs and a belt buckle cradled amid the hollow of the pelvis.

I must admit, even though I was looking at a dead man, a man my father had shot in the neck, I felt nothing. No stirring of guilt, no disgust. It was like looking at the body on the mountain: purely academic. And now, with Michael having told me this corpse belonged to someone crooked, someone who’d tried to kill my father, I felt even less. The body in the coffin was meaningless to me. I’d tried so hard to shield myself with blind ignorance, I didn’t know a single thing about the long dead policeman. I’m not even sure I knew his name.

That said, last time I checked, he hadn’t had two heads.

I’d seen inside this coffin before, at the open-casket funeral, and it had definitely been single occupancy. I wondered not only who else was in this coffin, but how they’d gotten in there.

The second skull was smaller, though it had the same amount of decomposition. A tight, leathery skin stretched over its scalp. The head was tilted down, jaw facing the formerly white silk cushion, so I could see a jagged hole in the back of the skull, cracks feeding around to the ears. Shot or hit, I wasn’t sure, but surely enough damage to have killed whoever this was. Now I was looking closely, I noticed fine, thin bones – a spine – that turned in to the larger skeleton. The ribs had interlocked as the flesh had worn away, which explained the ribs I’d thought were decomposing – they actually belonged to the second corpse.

I followed the spine more carefully, down to the pelvis, the bent knees, feet (small skeletal birds) tucked above the larger skeleton’s hip, as if sheltering against it. Clutching. It looked like that famous Rolling Stone cover of Yoko Ono and John Lennon. C-grade biology student or not, there was indeed one aspect of the whole scene that was undeniable. The thin circumference of the bones. This was someone small. Young.

Michael had brought this coffin all the way here to show me this: the body of a child curled up against the bones of a policeman. Now I had to ask him why. I took a half step towards the rear door.

That was when the truck started to move.

The first jolt was only enough to give me a slight wobble, to rock me back on my heels. My stomach did a little bungee jump as my organs tried to match their newfound velocity to my stationary feet. Encased as I was in the dimness, it took a couple of seconds for my brain to be happy I was still balanced. I edged forward on sea legs. It was only a few metres, but I want you to know that everything that happened next happened in seconds. There was a series of urgent thumps on the truck’s flank.

‘Ernie, get out of the bloody truck!’ Female. I couldn’t tell if it was Erin or Sofia.

I tried to hurry while keeping my balance. I had a strange feeling of walking uphill, which meant the truck was moving forward and I was going against the current to get to the back door. The canvas straps hanging from the walls lilted towards the front cab. The thumping on the flank continued, but the rumble of the now quickening wheels was drowning out the voice that went with it. I knew what they were saying though: hurry. I’d already figured that out. The truck was headed down the hill. And the only place the mountain plateaued was in the middle of a frozen-over lake . . .

A slit of light appeared as the door shuddered up half a metre. Erin poked her head in, puffing, walking to keep up. ‘Come on, Ernie. Hurry up! The slope just gets steeper.’

‘What the hell is going on?’ I yelled, staggering over to her against the tilt of the floor.

‘Handbrake’s off. You must have rocked it around a bit and it just started moving. Crawford’s trying to break into the driver’s side to put the real brakes on. There’s some brown shit on the ground, maybe brake fluid, though – so save us all time and just get out in case we can’t stop it.’ She made to grip the underside of the shutter door, but couldn’t hold it and jog at the same time. Even in a few seconds she’d gone from a quick step to a jerky wide-legged jog in the shin-deep snow. The truck wasn’t going all that fast, but it was difficult to keep up in the slush. I knew it was about a hundred metres or so to the road, and then once we crossed that another couple of hundred to the lake. The slope only really kicked in after crossing the road, but the truck was so heavy, if it got enough speed up, it would be impossible to stop. I knew I had to get out before it started really moving.

‘You’ll have to go low,’ she said, reaching out a hand. ‘The snow’s soft enough to fall on so just roll out.’

I crouched, one knee down, just as the truck lurched again, harder than the first time. I fell, sliding out of Erin’s grasp, reached for a strap, missed it, and landed hard on my arse, sliding backwards until I stopped with a breath-expelling thump, my back against the driver’s cab. The truck must have hit a bit of a slope now, because everything was moving: the hanging straps whipped against the walls and my face, a toolbox had fallen somewhere and bolts and spanners ricocheted off the floor and peppered the back wall. I tilted my head just in time for a screwdriver, hurtling tip-first at my eyeline, to clatter off the metal next to my ear.

Then I heard a long, slow screech. A scraping against the floor. The coffin was sliding towards me. Several hundred kilograms of lead, wood, and two skeletons. I tried to move, but gravity and confusion are deadly friends. I’ve told you already I’ve been typing this whole thing one-handed: this is why.

There was an explosion of pain in my right wrist, followed by an almost immediate numbness, like I’d sat on it. I went to pry myself off the wall but felt a tugging in my shoulder. My arm wasn’t following instructions. It sounds stupid that I had to look at it to figure it out: the coffin had slammed into the middle of my forearm, pinning it to the wall. I’d just seen a skeleton’s hand, so I had a queasy image of the dozens of tiny bones I’d probably broken. But that was the least of my problems. Before, the truck had been ambling down the slope as I unconcernedly tried to stumble out of it. Now, as it continued to pick up speed, I was trapped.

I used my good arm to tug at my immobilised elbow, but it wouldn’t budge. I then tried to work my fingers between the coffin and the wall, attempting to relieve even the smallest millimetre of pressure, just a smidge, but it was too heavy. My fingers came away slick and wet. Blood. I couldn’t feel it, everything was numb with shock, but I was tearing the skin from my hand as I pulled. A paramedic would tell me later – when I was off the mountain, after three more deaths and an unmasked killer – while threading a curved metal needle through hanging flaps of skin, that the medical term was ‘degloving’. I’m glad I hadn’t known that at the time; I would have fainted.

I looked back to the entrance to assess my chances of rescue, which were less than reassuring. Erin was still keeping up, despite the deep snow, but the look on her face gave away her urgency. I could see her reaching into the truck, her head moving in a slight hop as she tried to get purchase and scramble in, but eventually losing her grip and sliding away into the distance, before coming back to try again.

‘I’m stuck,’ I called, not sure if she could see the coffin pancaking my arm. A tinkle of screws and bolts rolled across the floor. ‘How far to the lake?’

‘That’s probably a question’—she was panting now; the depth of the fresh snow was tiring her more than the pace, and making it even harder for her to jump into the hip-height truck—‘you don’t want to know the answer to.’

That answered my question as much as not answering it would have. Time was not only borrowed, it was charging interest. I placed my feet against the coffin and tried pushing it sideways instead, pulling back so hard I thought my arm might come loose from my shoulder socket. It didn’t give an inch.

‘Where’s the main road?’ I called. ‘The snowbank that borders it . . .’ It was hard to catch my breath. ‘Might be enough to stop us.’

‘That was it before, went straight through it,’ Erin called. Damn. The snowbank must have been the bump that sent me tumbling. Some saviour.

I reset my mental geography. If we’d already gone past the road, that meant the slope was about to get a lot steeper very quickly.

‘Ern.’ A new voice, Sofia, arrived. It was hard to see with the slim aspect of light and the acceleration of the truck, but an approximation of her head bobbed into view. ‘What’s happening? You’ve got about thirty seconds before this gets away from us. Get out already!’

‘I’m hurt. I can’t move.’

‘Wait. Is that a coff—?’

‘Help me get in there,’ Erin interrupted.

‘Is it safe?’

‘Of course it’s not. Give me a boost.’

Everything was starting to get blurry. The adrenaline must have been fading because the pain was starting to creep into my wrist and radiate up my arm, which was making the edge of my vision fuzzy and unfocused. I tried my best to zone in on Erin and Sofia. They were in the light. They were solid objects. They seemed an infinite distance away. Then a third shadow arrived.

‘No luck.’ A male voice now, Crawford. ‘I broke the window but it’s too high. There’s not enough time before . . . Hang on . . .’ His next words were muffled, but I caught enough of them. ‘Did you not get him out?’

‘He’s stuck,’ said Sofia.

‘Stuck?’

‘He’s hurt.’

‘How bad?’

‘Not sure.’

‘Bad enough to not be out here with us,’ Erin snapped.

‘Ow. Watch my toes,’ Crawford said, as Erin stepped on him. Together the three of them must have heaved the shutter up a bit further, because light flooded in. Crawford spoke again: ‘Oh my God. Is that a . . .?’

That was when everything suddenly changed from mild alarm to outright panic. All three were actually running now: we must have hit the steeper slope. I figured the extra light had also revealed more of my injury, adding to the chaos. Erin had started yelling at Crawford to help boost her in. I heard Crawford rebuffing her: it was too dangerous; too risky. Things that would have inflamed her ears, sexism rearing its head under the pretence of heroism.

I waited for Crawford’s boots to clang into the truck instead. A strap hit me in the face. I grabbed it with my free hand and yanked with all my strength. Whoever had hung it from the wall hadn’t tied it very well, as it came free, the buckle attached to it clattered to the ground. It was like a giant seatbelt. I reeled it in, fumbling it one-handed around my waist into a simple knot. The loop was loose but maybe good enough.

‘Hurry! Damn it, Ernie, do something!’ That was Sofia, a shrill, panicked scream this time. And it was just a little bit further away. I realised I hadn’t heard Crawford get into the truck. It dawned on me that he wasn’t stopping Erin so he could chivalrously rescue me himself, he was stopping her altogether. I looked up from what I was doing with the strap to see that all three were getting smaller by the second. Then I realised all the straps were back to hanging vertically. Gravity was back to normal. The inertia in my stomach ebbed, indicating that the truck had come to a stop.

That should have been good news. Except I knew the truck hadn’t outrun Sofia, Erin and Crawford. They had stopped chasing it because it wasn’t safe to go any further. They’d run out of time.

Which meant that I was now trapped in four tonnes of metal, in the middle of the frozen lake.

I’ll spare you the dishonest suspense of gently creaking ice and spider-web fractures on the surface: the truck sat for less than five seconds before it dropped several metres with a jolt and settled at a thirty-degree tilt. The cab, to my back, had gone in first. Another lurch, and the whole thing was at forty-five degrees. I knew I had to think of something, and fast.

A kernel of a plan formed. I flung the heavy buckle as hard as I could, but I gave it too much air and it clanged off the still-half-closed door and slid back to me. On my next try, I slid it across the floor; it skittered along before sliding out the gap. I wasn’t expecting it to catch on anything that would hold my weight – the lake’s surface was barren – but I wanted something on the surface. If I went under, my main concern was finding the hole in the ice again. If I didn’t pull on the strap, unsecured as it was, I could possibly follow it up to the surface. The walls were groaning from the outside pressure of the water. I could hear dripping, and I could smell the cold. I’m not sure, but I may well have been under the water line at this point. I gripped the chrome handle of the coffin with my good hand, ready for what came next. I would only get one shot.

It happened quickly. Another splintering crack of ice and suddenly I was on my back, looking up through the semi-open door at only sky. The truck was at ninety degrees. That was all I needed. Instead of pushing the coffin off me against gravity, like I’d been trying to do, I pulled the chrome handle towards the roof of the truck. Before we’d tipped, that would have been like trying to bench press the thing but now the coffin was basically standing on its end. I only had to tip it over. Ignoring the fact that it was making a mortar and pestle of my forearm, I gave it all I had. And, finally, something went right.

It tipped.

I apologise if I haven’t properly conveyed my enthusiasm. It tipped!

The coffin slammed into the roof (now the wall), propping diagonally above me and, lid splayed, scattering dust and bones everywhere across the back wall (now the floor), and freeing my hand (now flat) in the process. I rolled to the side just in case it settled back down, clutching my mangled hand, feeling the wetness, but not yet having the willpower to survey the damage. It was either too cold or I was in too much shock to register the pain properly.

I got to my feet and looked up at the sky. The strap I’d thrown still snaked its way up and out above me. I thought I heard yelling – my name, probably. I wasn’t sure. I looked around my prison. There was no way I could scale the floor-cum-wall with a brutalised arm. The strap wasn’t hooked to anything, so I couldn’t climb it. And, of course, the entire truck was still sinking. Water lapped at my ankles, filling from a leak sprung in one of the walls. Eskimos may have a thousand words for snow, but no word can describe how numbingly cold the water was. Years ago when I was waiting for the results from the fertility clinic – after I’d discovered that scrotal heat was apparently a factor in sperm counts, and started swapping briefs for boxers, lugging a bag of servo ice over my shoulder up to our bathtub – I might have been excited by the potential of water this cold. But not now. It was anaesthetic. It was heart-stopping. The thought nudged its way into my head that this is how they make caviar; they stun sturgeon fish in cold water before cutting them open.

It wasn’t long before water started spouting over the lip of the door. First it was a steady pour from one corner, but then it was half-a-dozen waterfalls all around the rim. The icy froth swilled to my knees. I kept looking up, hoping the strap would lie unmoving on the ice and not slide into the truck. I checked the knot around my waist with my good hand. My plan was simple: let the water do most of the work raising me as close to the truck’s exit as possible, and then, once the truck was filled, all I had to do was swim straight up, as the truck sank away from me. I had to remember to use the floor to guide myself through the gap in the shutter door so I didn’t get trapped. And to not pass out due to the shock of the ice water. Or pull on the strap. But even if I did: up, up, up. Simple enough. Sure. I felt the strap pull upwards against my waist. It felt like a tug.

The water reached my chest. Nothing left but the roar of water in my ears. I could only see a small patch of sky flecked with spray and foam, ever narrowing. Everything below my neck constricted with the cold. I thought about the sturgeon fish. It was comforting to think that if my heart stopped from the shock, at least I wouldn’t have to know I was drowning.

Up, up, up, I chanted in my mind. Then the sky was gone. I took a deep breath. Up. Up. Up.

CHAPTER 26

I woke up naked.

My brain tried to piece together whether someone had dragged me across the ice and onto the bank, but, as more of my senses came back, I realised I wasn’t cold enough to be outside. I was in a bed. The sheets were tucked up around my neck as if I were a nightmare-prone child, tight enough to be in an asylum. I blinked away the fog.

I wasn’t elevated, so I couldn’t be in my bed, up in the chalet’s loft. I figured I was in one of the guesthouse rooms. There weren’t many identifying features; the room was dimly lit and the curtains drawn. That was annoying, because I couldn’t tell the time and I didn’t want to be one of those clichés whose first questions upon waking were ‘What time is it?’ or ‘How long was I out?’ Two shadows held a murmured conversation across the room, unaware that I’d come to. My right hand had a constant, pulsing ache. I pushed the covers down to inspect the damage and realised I was wearing a floral oven mitt. I tugged at it, wincing as the glove resisted. I put one finger in the opening and felt a sticky membrane; it seemed like my skin had scabbed into the cotton fibres. I’d fused to the damn glove.

Someone put a hand on my shoulder, stopping me pulling. ‘I wouldn’t.’ I looked up and saw Juliette, the resort owner, shaking her head. Katherine was behind her. ‘You don’t want to see it.’

Katherine offered me a pill from a small orange bottle. I took it, inspected it. ‘Oxycodone, painkiller. It’s the serious stuff,’ she said, by way of explanation. That was enough for me, I popped it in my mouth. She thought for a second, wondering how possessing such pills reflected on her sobriety, I guessed, and added defensively, ‘For my leg.’

I disappointed myself by asking, ‘How long was I out?’

Katherine walked to the window and pulled the curtains back, revealing the same black forever sky I’d fallen asleep under the night before. It looked like it had stopped snowing, but the wind must have still been high: the window rattled in its frame.

‘A few hours,’ said Juliette. I pulled myself up into a sitting position, which caused a coughing fit and a scramble to maintain my dignity as the sheets moved. Katherine passed me a white hotel robe, flat hand shielding her view. I realised that Marcelo was also in the room, sitting on a small couch, just watching all of us. This was surprising; although he could never be accused of being absent, he also wasn’t a sit-by-the-bed type of step-parent.

My coughing kept going, stars bursting across my vision. Too much too early. Juliette pushed me back into the bed, demanding I rest. She held a hand out to Katherine, who shook her head, stingy with the pills. Juliette cleared her throat loudly, and I recognised Katherine’s resigned sigh. The next thing I felt was the slim pill wriggling between my lips. Then everything got murky, and I was underwater once again.

Mountain nights bring with them a special kind of blackness. Especially on the dawn side of the peak, the sun sets early and it gets dark fast. Without the glow of a city to interfere, it’s easy to mistake any time from late afternoon for that ink-dark pit between midnight and dawn. I woke in this darkness. At least I was wearing a robe this time.

Katherine and Juliette had left, but Marcelo still sat by the window, cast in the light of a lone lamp, reading something pinched from the library. He heard me move, put the book down and dragged his chair over. I hauled myself upright again, suppressing the urge to cough. I felt lighter, sort of floaty, but in much less pain than before. It must have been the pill. I was thankful to Juliette for scrounging a second dose out of Katherine’s tight purse.

‘Glad you’re all right,’ Marcelo half-grunted, in the way that older men often try to express emotion: by shooting out anything that could be construed as affection as fast as possible, like a sneeze.

‘I’ll survive,’ I said without looking at my hand, afraid it might change my answer. ‘Where’s everyone else?’

‘You sort of fainted – not sure if you remember – after you woke up the first time. It’s only been a blink. Katherine and that resort lady just stepped out to find some food for you.’

‘How’s Michael?’

Marcelo shrugged. ‘I was hoping you could tell me that. Crawford is still not letting me in.’

‘I’m surprised you didn’t bust in while he was out rescuing me. The Drying Room would have been unguarded that whole time – it’s only got the slide bolt on the outside.’

‘Wish I’d thought of that at the time.’ Marcelo’s tongue darted out from the side of his mouth. It was hard to pinpoint if it was a tell or if he just had dry lips. The air up here did that quickly. I suddenly realised I was parched, my throat scratchy. I hacked a cough, and Marcelo got up and went into the bathroom, calling back, ‘Besides, we were all a bit tied up with that stunt you pulled down at the lake. Should have charged the other guests for the show – I think you had every set of eyes on you.’ He retook his seat, handed me a glass of water. ‘You’re right, actually. It would have been the perfect opportunity to sneak in and see Michael.’

I drained the glass in a long pull but was still parched when I finished it. Drowning’s funny like that. At least I could talk. ‘So, are you my bedside guardian, or are you just making sure you’re the first person I talked to when I woke up?’

‘Is it so horrible that I wanted to make sure you were okay?’ He shifted in his seat, then tried to laugh it off. ‘Doesn’t mean I don’t have questions.’

‘I think I’ll go first, if you don’t mind.’ We both knew I wasn’t asking. It was rare to see Marcelo Garcia, impervious to the pressures of court and law, on the back foot. He wanted to know what I knew, which meant that, immobile as I was, I held the power. That small pleasure helped mask the pain in my hand, which, as my body woke up, had started to throb again.

Marcelo gave a deep exhale. It whistled through his teeth. ‘What did Michael tell you?’

‘About Alan.’

Marcelo closed his eyes, held still for a beat, and then opened them. I knew that slow blink. It’s what people do when they wish they could rewind something just a few seconds. To not see their partner in bed with someone else. To not hear something they know is a lie. To not hear something they know is the truth. With their eyes closed, they rebuild the world unchanged, the way it was before. It’s the type of blink done over breakfast tables, that wishes letters unread.

‘So you know about the Sabres, then.’

‘A little. Less than you, I suppose, which I’d quite like to even out.’

‘It was more a collective than a gang. Your father didn’t even like the name, but they needed something to call themselves. They did burglaries, mainly, enough to be noticed by the law but not heavily pursued. Your dad was more of a nuisance than a criminal – he just did enough to get by. That was before it got, well, worse.’

I could see him reading me, trying to see how much I’d already been told by Michael, to see where he could cut corners, shave fractions off the truth. I’m terrible at poker, but I figured my firm-set grimace (my mangled hand was demanding attention; all I could do was grind my teeth in an effort to keep focus on Marcelo) could only be dissected as constipation or consternation.

He continued. ‘I met your father and his friends inadvertently. This was before I got into corporate law – I’d take anyone who came through my door. I was cheap and I was dogged, and I got a few robbery charges downgraded to trespassing, that kind of thing. And then I started getting more calls. I guess I was discreet, did right by someone who knew someone, and one recommendation led to another. I wasn’t the Sabres’ lawyer per se, and I never broke the law, but I was certainly someone a certain group of people found easy to call over certain matters. I’m not foolish enough to be completely blind to what was going on, but I needed the money. For Sofia.’

‘For Sofia,’ I repeated absent-mindedly.

I was thinking about something Michael had said to me in the Drying Room: Dad broke the law to care for us. Marcelo was saying the same thing, except I didn’t believe him. Because Michael’s point was that Dad hadn’t used his crimes to fund excess, but the same couldn’t be said of Marcelo, could it?

‘It’s true.’ Marcelo sounded defensive. He’d caught me looking at his Rolex as I turned over Michael’s words. He held it up, tapped it. ‘This wasn’t some splurge. Your father left this for Jeremy, actually. In his will. It’s a shame we couldn’t pass it down.’

That caught me off guard. Just as parts of Michael’s story were starting to connect, some small dishonesty threw the whole story out again. Michael had been adamant that Dad was the Robin Hood of criminals, the honourable thief, but if he’d gone around spending his ill-gotten gains on flashy jewellery, maybe he was just in it for greed all along. And if he’d had a high-end watch to give away on his deathbed, he might have had other valuables stashed somewhere else. That’s certainly what Erin had expected. Maybe that’s what Michael thought he was buying from Alan. Maybe that’s what someone else was killing for.

‘You know how they market Rolexes?’ Marcelo asked.

This seemed an odd question, and I didn’t really have time for Marcelo to brag about his successes, but I recalled the pithy advertising campaigns I’d seen, so I answered. ‘They sell them as a sort of legacy, to be passed down.’

‘Exactly. We didn’t get it for a while after Jeremy—’ He cleared his throat, uncomfortable. ‘So this is yours and Michael’s. I’m just the caretaker.’

‘For a caretaker, you’ve had it an awfully long time.’

‘Your mother and I decided one of you would get it when she died – it’s got nothing to do with me. It’s in her will. You can have it now if you want, though.’ He went to unfasten the clasp, which may have been a bluff, like offering a friend the last slice of pizza and hoping they declined.

I held up the oven mitt. ‘I’m not really in the market for a wristwatch.’

‘This is yours, and Michael’s, when you want it. But most of all, this is a watch designed to be handed down through family. I wear it to remind me.’ He paused, looking at the watch with a sentimentality that I really didn’t believe my father had possessed for trinkets. ‘To look after you both. And your mother.’

I covered my scoff with another hacking cough. All I saw was a rich man revering his own possessions, justifying the pursuit of his dead friend’s widow as noble. It would have been pure pleasure to point out Marcelo’s vanity, more than from Katherine’s pills (of which, to be honest, I desperately needed more), but we’d strayed too far from the topic and I wanted to get him back on point. ‘So if you helped the Sabres, you’re telling me you represented Dad? You were his lawyer?’

‘That’s how we met. And we got to know each other, grew close. I did my best, but your father was on a path and sometimes that can be hard to change. He kept getting strikes, and in the end I couldn’t keep him from forty-five days all expenses paid, if you know what I mean. I think you were three, maybe four at the time.’ I didn’t remember Dad’s six-week sojourn specifically, but it fit with what I knew of a man I measured by his absences. Marcelo continued, ‘That was a wake-up call for both of us. He came out ready to start fresh, and by then I was done with taking envelopes of money without knowing where they were from. But the whole thing . . . I don’t know how to put it, but your father got caught in the current again. It felt like something had changed. Soon there was more violence on the Sabres’ side, less lenience on the law’s.’

‘Michael told me ransoms paid better than robberies,’ I said.

‘Exactly. A real estate agent was shot when he refused to open his safe. He survived, but this was not the type of confrontation the Sabres were known for. They weren’t happy with just jewellery scraped from drawers anymore, they wanted into people’s safes and, when even that wasn’t enough, their bank accounts. This was the late eighties – ransoms were in vogue. The Sabres tried it on, and they liked how it fit them. It pricked the police’s ears right back up. By then, everyone involved could be pinned as an accessory on some level. Robert knew if he got another strike, the next time he saw you you’d be shaving.’

‘So you got him a deal.’ I had to squeeze the words out. My hand was pulsing with such hot pain that I felt I could vaporise snow if I went outside and lay down in it. ‘He traded information for immunity?’

Marcelo spun his watch around his wrist. Another slow blink; erasing history he didn’t want to face. ‘I helped set it up. The deal was that he’d sketch out who the major players were. But every time Robert gave one answer to the detective, she asked two more questions. She wanted him in there, still working with the Sabres, which was the catch, because he was only incriminating himself further in an effort to please her, passing along information when he got it. Specifically, she wanted him to find out who was crooked, which officers were on the Sabres’ payroll. She wouldn’t let him out until she had the smoking gun.’

‘By which you mean irrefutable evidence against Holton and his partner? Michael told me the night Robert died was a set-up, so you’re saying these two were the ones Michael needed to incriminate, to have his deal honoured? Maybe he finally had something on them.’

Marcelo shrugged. ‘That’s always been my guess. Robert never showed me any of the evidence – that was between him and his handler. He used to laugh about what they had him doing, said it was some real spy shit. He thought it was pretty cool that he got to be undercover. At the start, anyway.’ Marcelo slid back in his seat, rubbed his hands up and down on his knees and stopped talking for a minute. He was in his memory. He missed his friend.

It was strange to think of my father like that, of him being missed. Did that give him legacy over infamy? Marcelo’s story filled him out just a little from how I knew him. A man who joked about spy shit. A man who had friends. I took Marcelo’s introspection as an opportunity to lean my head back against the wall, close my eyes and try to distance my mind from my throbbing hand.

Undercover. Handler. Spy shit. I turned the words over in my head. I’d written one of my how-to guides on spy novels, so I knew a little tradecraft from Ludlum and le Carré, but it hadn’t sold very well.

‘That’s all I have.’ Marcelo’s voice wormed its way into my meditation.

‘Is it?’ I kept my eyes shut, hoping that my half-dead appearance was non-threatening enough to spur a further confession. Marcelo didn’t bite, so I applied some extra pressure. I was technically a lawyer now after all; it gave me permission to be ruthless. ‘You knew about all this during Michael’s trial. You used Alan’s history to manipulate the prosecution, knowing that they’d rather suppress the information than deal with his sordid history in open court. That’s why no one probed Michael’s large withdrawal or tried to find the money, why no one pushed the oddness of the gunshot.’

‘What money?’

That rattled me a little. Surely Marcelo had checked Michael’s bank accounts? How did nobody in a murder trial notice such a large amount? Even if Michael had taken it out incrementally, it would have been obvious. I didn’t know the specifics of legal discovery. I made a mental note to read more legal thrillers.

‘I don’t know what you’re implying, but I got Michael the best deal I could, using what I had to do so. That’s my job.’

‘You’ll bend the rules for Michael but not Sofia.’ I remembered he was choosing not to act as his daughter’s lawyer on her malpractice suit.

‘That’s . . .’ He bristled. There was a rustle of clothes as he sat upright. ‘That’s not entirely true. Believe it or not, I’m doing what’s best for her.’

‘Then what is the truth, Marcelo?’ I raised my voice, opening my eyes to put him on the spot. I was aware that they were likely bloodshot, intense, half-drowned. Marcelo glanced towards the corridor. I caught this, interpreting his worry that we’d be interrupted as meaning he still felt he needed me alone. Getting worked up was hurting my hand, but it was stressing Marcelo, so I kept it up. ‘It can’t be a coincidence that the truck went renegade down the hill after I’d spoken to Michael and I’d started looking at this morning’s victim more closely. The truck’s handbrake was off. Erin thought there was brake fluid. That has to be deliberate. Someone just tried to cover up something they hoped was buried thirty-five years ago, something that Alan and Michael have brought to the surface. Dad was looking for a smoking gun before he died, and we know Alan sold Michael information about something—’

‘All right, all right.’ Marcelo hushed me through gritted teeth. His eyes darted to the door again. ‘All I know is he was supposed to meet his handler that night, to give her something important. I think Robert witnessed a murder.’

There it was.

‘A child,’ I said, matter-of-fact.

He blanched, sturgeon-fish-stunned. ‘How’d you know that?’

‘Hunch.’

‘That’s all I’ve got too. Hunches and theories.’ He said it in a way that I didn’t entirely believe, as if he was still deciding what to tell and what to withhold. ‘After Robert’s death, I spent some time trying to figure out what could have been big enough to kill him over. Not to mention, something that would scare him enough that he’d start carrying a gun. Trust me – that wasn’t normal. I told you the Sabres were becoming more volatile. It wasn’t just people getting hurt – you said it yourself, ransoms paid better. That’s what your father wouldn’t stand for, not when he had kids of his own. But about a week before he died . . . It’s an old story, you’ll know the beats. A rich kid is taken for ransom. The family fluffs the drop. Even though they can afford it, they try packing a suitcase full of leaflets instead of money. And the girl’s never seen again. Nothing was ever proven, but it had Sabres written all over it. Did Michael mention—’

‘What was the girl’s name?’ I stammered.

‘McAuley.’

‘First?’ I wanted her to have a real name. A legacy.

‘Rebecca.’

‘How much was the ransom?’

‘Three hundred.’

My mind was slippery, but something else Michael had said returned. I brought what I could, but it wasn’t what he wanted.

Alan had sold Michael information about Rebecca McAuley, an unrecovered kidnapping victim from decades ago. Possibly who’d killed her. Definitely where her body could be found: buried forever in the coffin of a policeman. The perfect hiding spot, nestled under six feet of earth in someone else’s coffin. With the advantage of a high-speed non-mountain-range internet connection while I type this all out, I’ve learned that this was a common trick of the Chicago Mafia to disappear people, so of course cops knew about it. It went hand in hand with cement shoes.

It made sense that Alan knew where the body was – he was the one who’d hidden it.

I remembered at the funeral there had been a bit of a row with the family: the policeman, who I now knew was Alan, had wanted the body cremated, maintaining it had been his partner’s wish, something they talked about on duty. But the family had deferred to the will and insisted on a burial. Alan had been upset, and rightly so, because burying Rebecca’s body wasn’t as perfect as reducing it to ash.

And the price? That was the easy part. Alan wanted Michael to pay the debt that he felt he was owed by the family not paying up. A thirty-five-year-old ransom. And Michael was willing to pay up in order to find out who was responsible for our father’s death.

I tried to imagine Alan, frantically trying to cover up his misdeeds: the body of a girl and a ransom unpaid. If he knew my father had evidence, it made sense to kill him. When Alan’s partner died, opportunity knocked, and he’d been able to bury his secrets.

‘Michael found Rebecca’s body.’ I decided to take a leap of faith, both in sharing this with Marcelo and assuming the second skeleton in the truck was Rebecca’s (but, seriously, who else’s was it going to be?). Marcelo’s eyes widened; I pushed on. ‘It’s in the back of his truck. It was the first thing he did when he got out, so if we assume that he’s been waiting three years to dig it up, we can also assume Alan told him where it was. The problem is: if my father had evidence on Rebecca’s murder, it wasn’t where her body was buried.’

‘Because she was buried after he was killed,’ Marcelo agreed. ‘So your father was trying to give his handler something else that night. Some other evidence. You think that’s what Alan was selling – Robert’s final message to his handler?’

‘Perhaps. But I can’t get my head around why Alan would sell Michael information about a murder he’d committed.’ It didn’t make sense without the answer to this puzzle, and I wasn’t sure I’d grasped it yet.

‘Unless Alan didn’t murder anyone, and was just protecting the person who did. Alan’s a policeman, remember – if he was indebted to someone, I’d wager they’re a dangerous sort.’

This fit what Michael had told me earlier in the Drying Room, that he thought Alan was selling somebody else out. It also brought Michael’s sentence into focus, a meagre three years because, in his own words, there were some people who would prefer Alan’s history not get an airing in open court. Things were clicking together. Reader, it has not escaped me that this scene is the ‘It Goes All The Way To The Top’ one.

Marcelo was watching me digest all of this, trying to figure out if I believed him. ‘Fast-forward to three years ago. Alan’s life is on the skids, he’s in and out of jail and barely scraping by. Maybe he thinks that Rebecca McAuley was where it all started going wrong, and he decides he’s ready to bring someone down. And so he comes back to where it all started, luring Michael in with promises of revelations about his father.’

‘I can see why he didn’t choose me.’ I shook my head. ‘I’m not one for family history. Which is why I’m the only one Michael trusts. I was willing to testify in court against him, which showed that I didn’t know enough to be scared, which apparently I should have been. That earned me trust.’

Marcelo’s jaw tensed, assumedly to trumpet that what he’d done to get Michael a lighter sentence should have earned him some trust of his own, but then he seemed to think better of it.

I didn’t say it, but Marcelo’s age also put him firmly in the suspect category. Now I was looking for someone who’d committed a murder three decades ago and a murder this morning. That left Audrey, Marcelo, Andy and maybe Katherine. Katherine would have been on the young side back then, but she’d had a wild youth; there was no telling what she might have been swept up in. I’d still been wetting the bed, not exactly a prime suspect. Then again, I was assuming that both victims had the same killer – what if the motive was simple revenge? Anger is as much an heirloom as any Rolex. Take age out of it and everyone’s a suspect. Hell, maybe Rebecca herself was all grown up and killing people.

‘We’re forgetting the obvious. In the last twelve hours, more people have told me my father was a good man than the entire rest of my life. What if he wasn’t? What if Dad took and killed Rebecca himself?’

Marcelo leaned forward and gave my shoulder a squeeze. ‘I’m sorry you didn’t get the chance to know him better. I know it’s not much of a defence, but if you had, you wouldn’t believe he was capable of that. To be honest, I’m surprised Alan was.’

‘So we’re still stuck looking for a link. What’s Alan’s partner’s name?’

‘Clarke. Brian Clarke. Mean anything?’

If you were hoping for a name that brings everything together – Crawford, Henderson or Millot (Andy’s surname, which Katherine took after they married, and which it’s probably time to mention is actually Milton in real life; I told you I changed some of the names for fun and this is one of them) – I’m sorry to disappoint.

‘That name doesn’t link to anyone I’ve met so far. Any kids? Him or Holton? It would be a stretch to think anyone would be out to defend their family’s criminal legacy to such a point they’d want to target our entire family . . .’

‘You’re right. Besides, no kids.’

Marcelo went quiet at that; it seemed like disappointment. A dead end on Alan’s partner. I was struggling to maintain all of the threads and theories now: my head had joined my hand in a metronomic pulse, the pain washing in and out. I didn’t know how long Marcelo and I had been talking, but I was exhausted. I must have closed my eyes for a second that morphed into longer in the real world, because a gentle tapping on my cheek brought me back around, Marcelo’s face leaning over me.

‘I’m sorry. I’ll get you another one of those pills when Katherine gets back. But just hear me out. I am scared, okay? I’m worried that people who know things, which now, unfortunately’—he lingered with a regretful tone on that word—‘includes you, might get hurt. I hadn’t heard of the Black Tongue until Sofia brought them up over breakfast. And you asked me to check out the victims. And that set it, in my mind. Everything I’ve told you I’ve been thinking about for years – it was only ever a half-cocked idea. I never thought to share it with anyone. But this morning, this Black Tongue thing, that’s something I can’t ignore. That’s one of your rules, right? No coincidences?’

I chuckled. It wasn’t one of Knox’s rules, but it was part of an oath he followed for the Detection Club, so I gave Marcelo credit for being close enough. ‘You read my books.’

‘I do care about you, you know.’ Another verbal sneeze, so quick and quiet I almost missed it. Like a child’s apology. ‘I’m certain someone’s cleaning something up. Because there were three people involved in the deal that led to your father’s death. Not just me and him.’

That woke me more than the taps. I remembered Marcelo’s hesitation when I’d asked him to look into the Black Tongue’s victims; he’d asked me to repeat one of the names.

‘The detective – my father’s handler. What was her name?’

‘You’re gonna hate this.’

‘I’ll bet I am.’

‘Alison Humphreys.’

CHAPTER 27

‘He’s up!’ Katherine beamed, shouldering open the door. She was carrying a large, khaki-green plastic case, a red cross haphazardly spray-painted on the side, which I’m pretty sure had once housed fishing tackle. It didn’t matter that she’d interrupted my conversation with Marcelo; I was glad to see her. I was so very glad to see her.

‘My hand hurts,’ I said. It wasn’t particularly subtle.

‘You can’t have one for another . . .’ Katherine set down the first-aid kit on the coffee table, and then bent over and checked Marcelo’s watch. ‘Actually, it’s better if you don’t know.’

‘Please.’

She flicked open the clasps and rifled through the contents, then made a satisfied click with her tongue and tossed something at me. A small green packet landed on my covers. ‘Panadol will have to cut it for now.’ She must have seen the betrayal in my eyes, because she softened. ‘I know it hurts, Ern. But after all that’s happened, I’m not having you OD. She already had to give you CPR.’ She jerked a thumb at Juliette.

This should come as no surprise: I said you’d read about us locking lips in this chapter. Just like I told you someone will die here.

‘Sorry I had to strip you,’ Juliette said bashfully. ‘Hypothermia gets in through the clothes, I’m sure you know.’ She said it like I might not. (Which, if you’d seen the draft of this manuscript, you’d know I didn’t: my editor had crossed out my first go at this sentence and written ‘Hypo=cold, Hyper=hot’ in the margin, in that helpful yet smug voice editors are born with, wishing to both correct you and impart their correctness upon you at the same time.) Juliette continued. ‘I didn’t do much though. If you hadn’t tied the cord around your waist, I don’t know if Erin would have—’

‘Erin?’ Realisation flashed. The voice on the ice. That tug on the strap, just before I went under. ‘What do you mean?’

‘She saw you throw the rope out the door. Sofia said Crawford couldn’t hold her back.’ Katherine was speaking plainly, far too matter-of-fact for what was running through my head. ‘She saved your life.’

‘What did she do? Is she okay?’ I stood. Blood surged to my head and I wobbled. Four hands propped me up. Katherine tried to shove me back onto the bed, but I pushed past her to the door. ‘Where is she?’

‘She went out on the ice,’ Katherine said.

‘Erin!’ I opened the door, staggering into the corridor. ‘Erin!’

Then I crashed right into her.

‘Jesus, Ernie.’ Erin reeled backwards, regaining her grip on the tray she was holding, which bore a can of soft drink and two bowls of hot chips. Her forehead crinkled as she said, ‘You shouldn’t be up.’ She then looked over my shoulder and said, ‘He shouldn’t be up.’

I don’t remember if I lost my balance or I genuinely dove at her, as I’m not one to throw myself at people, but the next thing I remember is wrapping Erin up as tightly as my oxycodone-limp limbs would allow. Erin returned my warmth, and we stood for a second like we weren’t on the mountain at all. Like we’d never changed. Like she didn’t have a chapter of her own coming up.

‘Been a while since I’ve had an ice bath,’ I whispered in her ear. She gripped my shoulders tightly. Her laugh was hitching, a sob mixed into it, and then we were both shaking in each other’s arms. I felt wet tears on my neck.

I may as well come out with it. That letter I opened from the fertility clinic over breakfast was supposed to be good news. My swimmers were an Olympic team. The ice baths and the boxers and the no-alcohol and the oysters, all those wild experiments to improve my fertility, were for nothing. I’d been confused, trying to figure it out, until I’d called the clinic. They told me my wife had been delighted to hear the news, which they’d passed on seeing as I kept missing their calls. I told them I hadn’t missed any calls, and when they’d checked, I realised they had Erin’s number, not mine, on their call list. She’d told them that I’d prefer to be mailed the results; they had a note on my file. And they’d had the right address all this time, so they couldn’t understand why I kept emailing to request they mail another. Amid that conversation was when I remembered Erin’s insistence to be the first to get the mail. Telling me the first letter was lost in the post. The second rain damaged.

All of that had torn through my mind like a cyclone as I read the letter over breakfast that morning. It had been sheer luck that I’d been to the letterbox ahead of Erin. Maybe she’d done it so many times she’d gotten complacent. As I read, the dark, mistrustful thought to check the bins, which were sitting on the front kerb, had crept in. I’d come back with foul juice from week-old stir-fry running down one wrist, clutching a small aluminium packet. You know the ones, they’re labelled with the days of the week.

Goodbye flint.

None of that mattered now. She’d saved my life. She was still here.

I could subconsciously feel the three people behind me, pressing in. They were spotting me, in case I fainted again, but it felt oppressive. I was acutely aware that someone had tried to send that coffin to the bottom of the lake. Maybe they’d wanted to kill me too, or maybe I’d just got in the way. Michael had sent me there, which was suspicious, but he’d gone to too much effort to bring the coffin up the mountain to simply get rid of it. If he’d wanted to lure me into a trap to kill me, he would have dangled something better in front of my face. Or just attacked me in the Drying Room. Whether I trusted him completely or not, he had let me in on a deadly secret. Now I had to ask him how it all fit together.

Erin helped me limp down the stairs, to the protests of the others, who insisted I keep resting. But my mind was alive, firing on painkillers and adrenaline. There was a cold breeze through the foyer, bright flooding lights; I wasn’t sure what they were, glittering through the frosted front windows. The door to the Drying Room gave a familiar phuck. Rubber-sealed. Airtight. Which was why, until I opened the door, I couldn’t smell that the air inside was strange. Thick with ash.