Cold Wallet, page 28
I knew I had to get off the streets as quickly as possible. A tall, heavily built man walking alone on a busy street cradling his left arm in his right, is bound to draw attention. People are curious. They have long memories when properly incentivised. The police may have stopped looking for me, but I was dead certain Murray and the gang hadn’t. There are enough meth users in Auckland who would do anything to get a free spot from their dealers. Dealers who had been alerted to look out for me.
Pearl would have made the call. Any sane person would do the same, if only in the interests of self-protection and hopefully a wad of cash. She’d been in their sights since that night in my flat. She didn’t know how long she could hide behind Margaret McFarlane. She needed insurance — I was it.
In ten minutes, I had reached the park, clambered over a stone wall and crouched down behind it, my back propped against volcanic rock. It was a different world on this side of the wall. For one thing it had sheep. Lots of sheep. Sheep don’t like rain any more than the next mammal. Like me they had found the only shelter available — the lee side of the wall. I wedged myself between two big ones who swung their heads around nervously to inspect me for teeth and weapons. When no threat was detected, they went back to thinking whatever sheep think about, which I suspect is not that much. Me on the other hand. I had a lot to think about. The cold was making the pain worse and scenes of me dying pathetically from hypothermia flashed in front of my eyes. I’d had broken bones before. Rugby. I was younger then and I don’t remember the pain being as bad. I couldn’t believe how much it hurt when I eased my arm out of my makeshift sling, and tried to put it into the sleeve. I leant against the wall when I’d finished and almost cried.
It was then that a Peanuts cartoon came to mind. It always rains on the unloved. That’s me, I thought — unloved — alone — in pain — abandoned. The story of my life. Isn’t that the truth? Okay, I did cry. A tear did dribble down one cheek and plop on to Errol’s coat. One tear — no more. With both my arms in sleeves, I was able to wrap the trench tightly around me and as my body warmed up inside my Burberry cocoon, I tried to think.
Damn it, I should have smashed the fucking laptop. I’d wiped as much as I could, but not enough — not enough. Any techie worth their salt, could, given enough time, recover what I’d done. Acid, a hammer, spilt coffee, all or one of the above, would have worked. Instead, typical me, all I could think about was a blow job. Fucking Meg Ryan. I reckoned I had twelve hours, twenty-four max, before they found me. Focus. All I had to do was get to the ship. Leave the sheep, the park, the city, the country behind. That, I had planned. The ship was waiting for me. Arranged weeks ago, it was due to sail at high tide, eight-forty p.m. tonight. I checked the watch in my pocket — Pearl’s watch, the one her mother gave her for her 21st birthday. The one she left in her bathroom cupboard, with Happy 21st Love Mum engraved on the back. I’d nicked it when I was in the bathroom. Hey, I didn’t have a phone. Six-twenty-six p.m. I had two hours to get from the sheep to the ship. Less than that if you took in getting past security and customs. The port was ten kilometres away. In the good old days when I was younger and fitter, I could have jogged it in under an hour. In the good old days when I was wearing trainers and not office brogues, and a hoodie, not a trench coat. In the good old days when I didn’t have a fucking broken arm. No phone meant no Uber. Not that I’d trust them anyway. Taxi? They still existed, but I had no money. Luckily the bus card was in one of the pockets and it still had money on it.
Climbing over the wall back to the pavement was difficult. There being a longer drop on the street side. I almost broke a tooth I was clenching my jaw so hard. Once I was over I lifted my left arm carefully with my right and tucked my hand into the pocket. Not as secure as the sling, but less obvious, and it would have to do. There was a bus stop at the end of the road. I headed for that, taking care to walk as normally as possible cursing Pearl and her self-defence fucking classes every time my left leg bore my weight and jarred the bone ends. A bus pulled up, but it was too far away. Passengers got off and it swooped into the rain before I could reach it. Just as well. Because that was when I saw the car parked behind where the bus had just been. A sedan, dark with two men sitting inside, smoking — waiting — watching. I carried on walking. The crowd of passengers who’d got off the bus came towards me, encircled me and without missing a step, I turned one-eighty and walked with them, taking comfort in the safety of numbers. The only problem — I was walking away from the port — away from the safety of the departing ship.
Fifty-nine
‘The operation went well Mr Turner. The surgeon is pleased.’
I looked down at the array of bolts and screws poking out of my arm like a giant Meccano set.
‘I look like a cyborg.’
‘It’s temporary — until the bones heal. Another day and you can get up and start moving around.’
‘I can leave the room?’
‘No.’
‘Oh.’
‘The machine’s running. Start whenever you’re ready.’
* * *
By the time I reached Quay Street, I was colder, wetter and in more pain than I had ever experienced in my life. I’m no wimp, but the pain was getting to me. It was excruciating. I know, a real man wouldn’t complain. Richie McCaw captained the All Blacks to World Cup victory in 2011 with two broken bones in his foot. I tried reminding myself of his stoicism, but it didn’t help. My arm was throbbing, pulsing waves riding a searing, gut-clenching wave to surge down to the ends of my fingers which felt as though they were being ripped off in a vice. To cap off the misery, I was starving and the smell of warm, spicy food wafting into my nostrils from the nearby Asian food outlets didn’t help. Four scrambled eggs eaten ten hours earlier are not sufficient to maintain the energy levels of someone my size. I needed food, lots of food, protein preferably, but I had no cash, no card and even less time.
I stumbled across the street in the dark, dodging in and out of cars and trucks, hugging my arm against my body. I had to find the fastest and least obvious route to the container terminal on Ferguson Wharf. I had arranged to meet my contact by the crane nearest the road at eight p.m. Pearl’s watch showed seven-forty-three p.m. and counting.
In front of me was a bloody great wire fence topped with huge loops of razor wire. A sign with restricted access written in big red letters on a white background was clipped to the wire. A road led into the port and a young bloke manned the booth at the entrance. He looked unsure when I approached on foot, most people were entering the area in vehicles. I gave him points for politeness but not for speed, when he greeted me with the obligatory kia ora and asked for my ID.
‘Undercover cop mate,’ I said. ‘Need to get to a meet-up asap.’
‘On foot?’
‘Too right, less suspicious.’
He looked doubtful but didn’t ask me to move on. Instead he asked again for ID.
‘I’m undercover, I don’t carry ID for obvious reasons. Are you going to let me through or not? Because if you don’t then I’ll have to report you for obstruction.’ I looked pointedly at his name badge. ‘Nigel Howard.’
Nigel was young. He wasn’t stupid. ‘Let me call central police and check. Name there?’
‘DS Sarah Parker,’ I said praying she wouldn’t answer her phone. He kept his eye on me, as he asked to speak to Sarah. ‘She’s not on duty,’ he said, covering the mouthpiece.
‘Yeah well. I can’t help that. Get them to page her. Tell them to hurry.’
Nigel hung up. A line of cars and trucks had backed up at the gate and some of the drivers were even more impatient than me. Arms were being waved out of windows and horns were being honked.
‘What’s your name,’ he asked.
‘Guy Harding,’ I replied without a moment’s hesitation.
Nigel wrote it down. ‘Go on,’ he said waving the first car forward. I ducked under the barrier arm. It was nearly seven-fifty p.m. I broke into a lurching jog, not sure where I was supposed to be going. As I looked up, the red lights at the top of the cranes loomed over a building so I changed course and headed towards them. Four minutes. Surely the contact would wait. What if he didn’t? I couldn’t take the risk and broke into a proper run, swearing every time my arm hit the edge of the pocket, sweating as I forced myself to keep going, too afraid the ship would leave without me. In my mind I saw it pulling away from its moorings in a surge of white water, front and rear, as the tugs towed it towards the shipping lane to begin its journey to Singapore and freedom.
Seven-fifty-two p.m. I leant against the steel leg of a crane and would have vomited if there had been any food in my stomach. I dry-retched and gagged, then retched again.
A man stepped out from under the shadow of the gangway. He beckoned, walking slowly towards me in the darkness, hat drawn over his face in the rain. I stopped retching, pulled myself upright and walked towards him. Relief flooded every fibre, every muscle every inch of my body and suddenly the pain was not so bad. Suddenly I had hope. We met in the middle. Underneath the crane, I saw his face, his eyelashes — it was Murray.
* * *
‘You know the rest,’ I said. Silence. I called out. ‘Hello? Is anybody there?’
‘Thank you, Mr Turner,’ said the voice. ‘You’ve been very helpful. One of us will be in touch next week. In the meantime, remember you’re here for your own protection. Relax. Let the doctors do their work.’
I looked at the white walls as I listened to the silence. I pressed the button on my morphine pump and counted to twelve. At twenty, I shut my eyes.
Sixty
It was when the leasing agent called to arrange a time to show a prospective tenant around the apartment that Jess knew she wasn’t ready to leave. Leaving meant relinquishing her life with Andrew. Despite knowing more about him and despite how her feelings had changed, she couldn’t let go of what they’d had together. Not yet. Not until she had something and somewhere to go to. She needed to work out what she was going to do before she left the place where she had been happy for such a short time.
When she called Ross to ask him how she could extend the lease, he suggested she take a small stipend from the insurance pay out, enough to fund her through the next three months. Hopefully by then, he said, she would know if the Medical Council was going to reinstate her practising certificate. Initially she’d been reluctant to take the money, which should have gone to creditors, but thinking through her position she tucked her conscience into a corner and accepted his offer — as a loan. She planned to pay it back once she was working again. Ross reassured her there was no hurry.
If it wasn’t for DS Parker continuing to hound her, life would have been tolerable. But the woman wouldn’t back off, seemingly determined to keep her in legal limbo. Jess hated the word closure. It was so over-used, so trite, but it was what she needed if she was to move on to use another over-used phrase.
Parker had been poking her nose into places she didn’t belong, dredging up Marguerite’s old work colleagues, old neighbours, interviewing the Prof, talking to the Medical Council and calling on contacts in Australia to dredge up information about Bryan. It wouldn’t have been so bad if she kept her progress, such as it was, to herself, but Parker was a sharer. She insisted on calling Jess at regular intervals to inform her of any new information even after Jess had specifically requested that all communication go through Ross. Jess never knew what would land in her Inbox from one moment to the next. The uncertainty and unpredictability kept her in a constant state of low-level anxiety. Just as Parker no doubted hoped it would.
It was the end of April, and Parker had still not found any evidence to either discredit the death certificate or a link from Jess to Bryan, yet she continued to insinuate to anyone who would listen that it was only a matter of time before she did. When Jess found out Parker’s repeated calls to the Medical Council had unsettled them to such an extent that her first hearing before the disciplinary tribunal had been postponed for three months, she was furious. The woman was intolerable.
‘What can I do Ross? She’s making my life a misery.’
‘Find the surgeon who signed that certificate. Get it verified. That’s one thing out of the way. The private detective could do some digging about Bryan for you. Give her irrefutable evidence then legally she has to leave you alone.’
Jess went back to the apartment and started her search. Phone calls to the hospital in Fiji put her in touch with the surgeon’s receptionist who informed her politely that she had already told the detective he was on an island setting up a new clinic. He had extended his stay by three months, and no, there was no Internet. When Jess expressed surprise that there was no way of contacting him, his receptionist, Mrs Santu expressed surprise she would think that. Because, of course, there was a way to contact him. Fiji was a developed country not a backwater. The receptionist went on to say how surprised she was that the detective had ended her call so abruptly without asking about other means of contact.
‘It was as if, she didn’t want to know,’ Mrs Santu said warming to the conversation. ‘This is the number of his sat phone.’ She reeled it off and Jess wrote it down. ‘As I told Simon, he’s contactable in the early evenings after ward rounds are over for the day.’
‘Simon?’ Jess asked. ‘That isn’t the same Simon who is the manager at the resort.’
‘The very same,’ Mrs Santu said her delight at being able to impart this information audible in her merry tone. ‘They’re old friends. I thought you knew. Your husband, Simon and Mr McDonald. They lived together in Vietnam, ten years ago. They called themselves the Three Musketeers. You know what young men are like at that age.’
Jess said she did know what they were like. Mrs Santu laughed and asked if there was anything more she could do for her.
‘No, nothing more. You’ve been a great help. Thank you.’
Jess ended the call with Walter Scott’s words, ringing in her mind. Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive. Exactly whose web was being woven, that was the problem. Parker’s? Andrew’s? Henry’s? Whose ever it was, she was sick of it. Everywhere she turned there was another complication, another twist. She wanted to return to the simplicity of medicine and be done with these people.
In the meantime, knowing she could neutralise Parker on one count was enough. Tempting though it was to immediately phone Simon and confront him, she needed time to think through what it was she wanted to ask him. The Three Musketeers. Seriously?
It was the beginning of May when Jess returned from her swim to a message from Parker requesting her presence at the station. She needed Jess to verify several documents, and was suggesting they meet at one p.m. the following day.
Jess showered, dressed and made coffee. She ate her breakfast and spent the next two hours checking her crypto positions. The chat group was busy. Inigo had gone long on Ether and people were wondering why. Wait and see was their answer. Inigo liked being mysterious. The discussion which followed was mostly gossip, but it was happy gossip considering Bitcoin had surged thirty per cent in value in recent weeks. Someone speculated the increase in value was because of one trade in April, when an investor traded 500,000 tether for 122 Bitcoin. More orders followed and boosted the price. Nothing unusual, Inigo said. They explained the original trade had occurred in a period of low liquidity and the stimulatory effects had lasted. After so much time studying the market, Jess understood what they were talking about. Whoever Inigo was, she thought, they were right. The group then turned to talk of one whale who’d moved over $212 million Bitcoin, unusual, but what was really amazing, the transaction had cost just $3.93 in fees. Try doing that with fiat currency.
The morning over, Jess called Ross to check the private investigator’s report had been received and that Ross was available to go with her to the station, not at one p.m. but at five p.m. On receipt of his confirmation, she emailed Parker and advised her when the meeting would take place.
Parker met them at the front door, wearing the same black jeans, jersey and boots she always wore. She’d had a haircut, which Jess said suited her. Parker shrugged but she seemed pleased with the compliment. Nothing in the interview room had changed other than the temperature which had gone from chilly to freezing. Huddled around the table, Ross and Jess made polite conversation as they waited for the room to warm up. It took five minutes, but finally the temperature had risen sufficiently for them to get on with the business at hand. Parker launched into her usual diatribe about not having the death certificate verified.
‘Before you traverse the same old ground I have something which will help,’ Jess said.
Parker looked up from the papers. ‘You do?’
Ross took out the original death certificate and lay it flat on the table facing the detective.
Jess had already emailed Tim McDonald on his sat phone to make sure he was standing by. Fiji is an hour behind New Zealand, which meant he was at the tail end of his four o’clock ward round, but he agreed to take the call. She dialled the number and after a few rings, he answered.
With the phone on speaker, Ross informed Tim who was in the room and asked him to formally state his full name, qualifications and his position at the hospital at the time of Andrew’s death. That done, he asked Tim to give a quick rundown of where he was and what he was doing now. He described the hospital he was building in the Lau Island group and how it would bring up-to-date services for the first time to a population of ten thousand people scattered over sixty islands north of Fiji, only thirty of which were inhabited.
