wind was soft and warm and she wasn’t cold, but still she shivered. She had need of Flotsam.
‘Okay,’ she continued finally. ‘Our people paid through the nose to be taken out of the country-say to some nice safe country like Australia. They were kept well clear of normal channels of transport. Normal refugee channels. They were taken overland, or by cheap flights to Asia, then onward by boat and landed on a remote beach somewhere up north. Then our pilot picked them up, only he was a fool, with a plan for more easy cash, and he died. They crashed.’
‘I’ve figured this out-’
‘Bear with me,’ she snapped. ‘I’m thinking out loud, and it helps if I do the whole scenario. So they crashed. The child was badly wounded-a lot of blood. The mother was slightly wounded.’
‘You don’t know-’
‘Wait.’ She glowered. ‘As I said, it’s assumption. But we have a dreadfully wounded child, a slightly wounded mother, and a father who’s okay. He’d have got them all out of the plane. His attention would have been on the child. But what was his next action?’
‘Check the pilot?’
‘Yeah. But the kid needed him. His wife maybe had a bleeding hand-something-not too much. So he’d have told her to check. She climbed up, leaving blood. She saw that the pilot was dead. And she saw the gun. She was in the middle of nowhere. Scared silly. Terrified. Of course she’d have taken the gun.’
‘So why didn’t he bring it?’ Alistair said slowly. ‘When he came to rob the store?’
‘Two reasons I can think of,’ Sarah said. ‘Either he doesn’t know she has it, or he’s left it with her. To defend herself. And neither scenario appeals. What we’re left with is a terrified, desperate woman with a gun.’
‘Hell,’ Alistair said softly, and Sarah nodded.
‘It is. For her it must be.’
‘So what do we do?’
‘Hope Amal pulls through,’ Sarah said. ‘Hope he can tell the police in Cairns where he comes from so we can at least call out in the woman’s own language. Larry agrees that we need to remove every uniform and every gun or anything that can be remotely taken for a gun at a distance from searchers.
If she thinks anyone’s armed it’ll make things worse. We’ll try and figure out through their names where they come from-there are people trying to do that now. As for the rest…’ She hugged Flotsam some more. ‘Nothing,’ she said bitterly. ‘Until the searchers go out tomorrow morning…nothing.’
‘You really care, don’t you?’
‘What do you think?’
There was a long, long silence. Sarah dug her toes into the sun-warmed sand. The night was closing in on them now-the moon was full over the sea and the shimmer of its light over the far-off waves made this place look lovely. An enticing land.
But it wasn’t, Sarah thought. It was deceiving. In a couple of hours the tide would sweep in and this would be underwater. There was no shelter. The mangrove swamps held crocodiles; there was no food; every scratch would fester in this warm, muggy climate.
Somewhere…
‘Sarah?’ Alistair said, so softly that at first she thought she’d imagined it. But she looked up and he was watching her, his eyes gravely questioning.
‘Yes?’
‘I wanted to ask you…’ He hesitated, as though not sure how to begin. Or even if he wanted to begin.
What was he going to ask? Sarah thought, half fearful.
And she was right to be fearful. His question, when it came, was right out of left field. He put a hand down and his finger traced the deep and jagged scar running the length of her left leg. ‘Sarah, how did you get this scar?’
He shouldn’t have asked. Long ago he’d had an odd and occasionally silly great-aunt who’d drummed in her Rules To Live By. ‘Don’t ask questions, boy. You might get answers you don’t like, and then where would you be, hey?’
That was how he felt now. But the question had been growing. The deep sense of unease. The feeling…
No. He wasn’t going to begin to acknowledge the feeling he had. The foreboding. He couldn’t. Until he heard the answer.
But he knew that he was right the moment he looked up from tracing the scar and saw her eyes. He saw the fear.
‘In the accident,’ she said, so softly that he had to lean forward to make sure he heard it.
‘In the accident-when Grant died?’
‘Yes.’
‘But…’ He was motionless. It was as if the whole world was holding its breath. He should shut up, he thought. He should back out right now. This was Grant they were talking about. It was as if he had to make a choice right now-Grant or Sarah.
Grant was his twin.
But Grant was dead. Six years dead. And Sarah was alive, living with consequences he could hardly bear to think about.
‘This is a jagged tear to the outside of your left leg,’ he said slowly, as if each word was torn from him. ‘And the only side of the car that was damaged was the passenger side.’
‘Well, then.’ She swallowed and tried to rise. His hand stopped her.
‘Sarah…’
‘Don’t ask, Alistair,’ she begged. ‘Grant’s your twin. You love him. Don’t ask.’
But he didn’t have to ask. He already knew the answer.
‘Grant was driving,’ he whispered. ‘My God…Grant was driving. But how…? How…? Did you agree to take the blame?’ And then, as she stayed silent, he thought back. ‘You had concussion. I remember. When Grant rang he said you had concussion and lacerations. That’d fit if you were in the passenger side. But he told me that you were driving.’
‘We hit a tree,’ Sarah told him. ‘When the police arrived Grant had hauled me out of the car.’
‘That’s what he told them?’
‘I assume. I was unconscious.’
‘He’d been drinking.’ Alistair swallowed. All the old anger came flooding back. The fury. The waste of it. The sheer bloody waste. And this girl…
‘He’d have been over the legal alcohol limit. To save losing his licence he dragged you out and he blamed you. Is that right, Sarah? Is that right?’
Sarah flinched. It had never been said. It had never been faced. And now it was harder to admit than she’d thought possible.
‘It’s right,’ she whispered. ‘I never had the chance to ask him-to confront him-but it must have been right. To lose his driver’s licence…to have it in the newspapers that he’d crashed while driving under the influence… You know how much he’d have hated it. But me… I had sedatives in my bloodstream, but there’s no law against that. Rumours were that I’d taken all sorts of illegal drugs, but there was nothing illegal about it. Grant knew that. He knew that if he said I was driving I wouldn’t be charged.’
‘But…he was dying.’
‘He didn’t think there was anything wrong with him.’ Sarah gave a bitter laugh. ‘You know that. He mustn’t have been wearing his seat belt. Not even that. He was drunk; he wasn’t wearing his seat belt; and he thought he’d walked away from the wreck without any injury.’
‘And you let him… You let him accuse you.’
‘I had concussion,’ Sarah said. ‘I lost a lot of blood. I was taken to hospital, and as soon as I came round they gave me an anaesthetic and stitched my leg. It was a big job, so they used a general anaesthetic. I was hazy-in and out of consciousness for almost a day. And when I surfaced they told me Grant was dead. Dead. That was it. No one interviewed me. No one asked me questions. I didn’t have to tell anyone what had happened because Grant had made a full statement to the police naming me as the driver. No one even asked me to explain the traces of sedative they found in my bloodstream.’
Alistair sat, silent. Trying to absorb it. He scarcely could. But it fitted. Dreadful as it was, it fitted.
