watching too many bad American cop shows. No way was I going to let life get that complicated.
It had occurred to me a few times that the guys might not have been dead, but it was a thought I didn’t want to contemplate. My brain said they were dead and my instincts said they were dead. I think I was just trying to scare myself. Anyway, they were dead. One of them had blood from his ears and mouth but no other injuries that I could see. The other had guts hanging out of his stomach where he’d been trampled. It was pretty foul. We took the rifles but we didn’t touch anything else. The magazines were empty, so we were right about their running out of ammunition.
And then back home. We had accomplished nothing. Unless you call the deaths of two people something. Oh yes, I had a grim feeling of revenge, which fitted in nicely with my anger at the people who had committed the kidnapping. I had fantasies about hunting all of them down and killing them one by one, even if it took years. I would be the Avenging Angel. There are horrific crimes and bad crimes and minor crimes, and then there’s overdue library books. Kidnapping Gavin was a terrible thing to do. It could never be justified, never, never, never. So I didn’t shed too many tears over the bodies in the paddock. But at the same time it didn’t get us anywhere. I had been distracted by Lee’s sudden awareness that there must be people spying on the house, and in the excitement of that neither of us had stopped to think that it actually didn’t matter much.
However, Lee did have one bright idea. He said, ‘Is it okay if I ring Liberation? If there’s one thing they’re really good at, it’s gathering intelligence, and if they have a look at those blokes they might be able to work out where they came from.’
I was a bit concerned. ‘I don’t want them hanging a double murder on me. It wouldn’t look good on my school record.’
‘Don’t worry. They take their own view of the law. Nothing we did today will faze them.’
‘Bloodthirsty lot. It’s very convenient though, isn’t it? To decide that you just don’t agree with the law so you’ll follow your own path.’
He gazed at me in that special Lee way.
‘OK, figure this one then. Talking on your mobile phone while you drive is really dangerous, isn’t it? Irresponsible, reckless, and definitely against the law?’
‘Yes, that’s right.’ I said that to humour him, because I was obviously being set up, but I still agreed about the phones anyway.
‘But it’s legal in New Zealand.’
‘Oh.’ I sat there and thought about this. ‘OK. I see what you mean.’
‘In one country you’re an irresponsible, dangerous law-breaker and in the other you’re a respectable lawabiding citizen. I’ll give you another example. Those flashing lights and stuff they put in for all the schools a few years back, so if you’re zooming along at a hundred you have to slow to forty when the kiddies are leaving to go home.’
‘Or arriving at school, yes, that’s right.’
‘One day it was OK to do a hundred and the very next day you’re a law-breaking lunatic. Yet nothing’s changed. You’re the same person driving in the same way as you were the day before. The only thing that’s changed is the law. Suddenly you’re a criminal.’
‘Some things are always wrong though. Murder, rape, the heavy stuff.’
‘In some societies that was part of the social fabric. Or religious fabric, or both. I’ve been reading about the early days of Bora Bora, where if they had a meeting to pay respects to their God, they killed people left, right and centre. They bred slaves especially so they could be human sacrifices. That wasn’t murder, not to them.’
‘But to us…’
‘That’s my point. I don’t think there are any laws that aren’t artificial. They’re just what the society decides they want or don’t want at that particular time. And once they’ve decided what they want, one of the ways to make it all work is to heap abuse on anyone who “breaks the law”, as they call it.’
‘But our laws are based on a principle… a philosophy.’
‘Which is?’
‘I don’t know. Something about respecting each person’s rights. Everybody has a right to live the life they want without interference from others. That sort of stuff.’
‘Oh yeah? Tell that to the refugees who came to Australia before the war. They were here legally but the government wouldn’t follow its own laws. Just locked them up and threw away the keys. Hey, check this out. Not long ago there was this thirteen-year-old kid in New South Wales. His mother was a prostitute and a heroin addict and she abused the kid. He got put in foster care when he was two or some young age like that, then later he got kicked out of multiple schools, then they diagnosed him as having a chromosomal abnormality and being intellectually impaired. Then, when he’s thirteen, he kills a little girl. Really brutally. Horrible stuff. So what does the judge do? Hits the boy with twenty years in prison.’
‘And your point is?’
‘What’s he being punished for? Being a murderer or being an abused child?’
I was silent. Sometimes Lee was way ahead of me. ‘So what should they have done with him?’ I asked finally.
He shrugged. ‘I dunno. Not send him to prison for twenty years though.’
‘If he’d killed Pang you might feel differently.’
‘Yeah, I might. And then you have to decide whether the relatives of victims are the best people to make those calls. I don’t think they are. Chances are they’ll be too blinded by grief and love and rage to see the whole picture.’
‘But as Gavin’s relatives, if that’s what you’d call us, we just went out and executed a couple of guys for what they’ve done to him.’
‘That’s true. And there’s not much I can say about it except that we didn’t make any definite plans to kill them. But yeah, you’re right, we could have stopped it and we didn’t. When the bull was trampling them to death I didn’t actually think about Gavin, I thought about my parents.’
And on that sobering note he went off to ring the Scarlet Pimple or someone else in Liberation. It left me to do the thing I’m worst at, and that was to wait. Once again my life was in other people’s hands and I didn’t like it one bit. I had to wait for the ID documents that I would use on the other side of the border, I had to wait for more information to come from Liberation, I had to wait for transport to get me to Havelock.
I waited also for another phone call from the kidnappers but there was nothing. No news didn’t mean good news for me, it meant no news. It was impossible to know what to read into their silence. It could mean that Gavin was dead, it could mean that their phone had been cut off because they hadn’t paid their bills, it could be that they were confused by the sudden silence of their spies. Most of my friends voted for the last one.
Jeremy sat at the end of my kitchen table and I sat at the corner beside him, sipping on a homemade lemon squash. He said that if Gavin was dead they wouldn’t tell me anyway. ‘Why would they tell you? He’s their bargaining chip. They have to convince you he’s still alive or they won’t get what they want.’
‘Thanks, that’s very comforting.’
He was actually there to coach me in my homework, which was to learn my new identity. I was now Paula McClure, daughter of Mr Jerry McClure and Dr Suzanne Spring. There was a real Paula McClure. She was currently at boarding school in Maryland, in the USA, and her parents were in Havelock as part of a media liaison programme. Don’t ask me what that means. But it took my breath away when I found out that the real Paula’s parents would have no idea that I was in the same city as them, let alone that I was posing as their daughter. For that matter the real Paula would have no idea, but seeing it was a long way to Baltimore it wasn’t so likely that she’d be troubled by having a stunt double in Havelock. Still, it troubled me. If someone impersonated me I’d blow about ten fuses. And what if I ran into someone who knew the real Paula? What if I ran into Mr Jerry McClure and Dr Suzanne Spring? What would I say to them? ‘Oh hi, guys, I’ve been meaning to look you up for ages, I’m your daughter, you know, Paula. So how have you been?’
Jeremy told me to put all those issues out of my head. He was quite… a word I like… curt about it. Curt. I knew a guy called Kurt once, who was anything but curt. And Jeremy was normally so uncurt. But now he was all business. ‘Keep away from those moral dilemmas, Ellie. They’re a waste of energy. You’ve got plenty else to worry about before you worry about that. Now, when’s your birthday?’
‘December 5,’ I replied promptly.
‘Not yours, stupid. Paula’s — the new you. When’s your birthday?’
