traction, speared off the road and become briefly airborne before crashing through bushes and reeds and into the cold, dark river. The bushes and reeds had disguised the accident almost completely to the casual observer as they had flexibly bounced back into place with little damage after the car passed through them.
Carey explained to Soward that the girl had somehow managed to escape from her parents’ tomb, swim to shore and crawl up the riverbank. He had found a pool of blood where she had apparently rested or blacked out for a while after which she then managed to drag herself another two hundred metres to the campground to raise the alarm.
The diver, who was a personal friend of Constable Carey’s, had said the car came to rest on the bottom of the river, almost fifteen metres out from the bank in water that was over five metres deep. Soward shook his head in amazement that the girl had managed to escape at all.
Soward noted the other set of tracks on the road which were headed inland, in the opposite direction to the girl’s car. The skid marks straddled the double centre line and then veered left, coming to rest in soft mud on the side of the road. When Soward first arrived at the scene, Carey had been taking measurements of their length and width. He told Soward they measured around fifty-seventy metres in length which indicated that the mystery car had probably been travelling at a speed in excess of one hundred kilometres per hour, depending on the type of car and what condition its brakes were in. Either way, it was a lot of speed to be taking into a fairly tight corner which was speed rated at seventy kilometres per hour by a road sign a short way up the road.
Soward listened in silence and then turned to watch as the ambulance, with lights flashing but siren quiet, slowly headed into Batemans Bay to take the girl to hospital. In a career which had already spanned nearly thirty- three years, he had attended hundreds of traffic accidents and although the circumstances differed a little each time, the results were inevitably the same. In a few careless seconds a girl named Kylie Faulkner had her life turned upside down.
Chapter 2
Present day
Sarah Rayner looked at her watch as she skipped along the sidewalk as fast as her heels would carry her. “Shit. I’m late. Eight-fifteen already! If Ivan catches me coming in late again he’s going to kill me. I’d be able to walk faster if I hadn’t worn these damn shoes.”
Sarah looked down at her feet that were wedged neatly into her four inch heel, red Manolos. They’d cost her three hundred dollars, on sale, about half a nights work at the club, depending on the generosity of the patrons, but she considered them a bargain and all her friends told her they looked fabulous on her. They were right of course.
As she made her way down Goulburn Street she stopped momentarily in front of Cypress Lane and peered into its interior. Despite being poorly lit and with an unpleasant smell wafting out of it, she reasoned that it might shave a couple of minutes off her journey and at that moment that was a bargain she was prepared to strike.
She turned in. It was dark, with the only illumination provided by the occasional shafts of light from the windows of the buildings that backed onto either side of the narrow one way road. Even during the day it was a dim and cool place as the sun struggled to penetrate. By the time she was twenty metres within its grasp, the sounds of the city were reduced to a distant hum.
Cinching her coat about her waist to ward off the rapidly cooling evening she forged ahead and looked toward the small square of light in the distance. The lane appeared to be deserted and she quietly wished for a crowd to accompany her. She had always been a people person. The only sound was her shoes and she listened to them for company. Before long however, in between the tapping sounds her heels made, she heard a small noise behind her. She’d just come from a bar where she had downed three daiquiris with friends and her mind was feeling their effect, but the noise behind her focused her attention and sobered her up instantaneously. She listened intently without stopping or looking behind her and again the noise came to her. It sounded like a shoe scraping against the pieces of gravel on the bitumen.
She looked behind her and despite the dim lighting thought she saw a shape move behind a large dumpster forty metres back down the lane. She stared intently at it and listened for sounds but heard and saw nothing. The movement she had seen, or thought she had seen, had only been for the briefest of moments and she began to wonder if she’d imagined it, but at the back of her mind a cold and certain fear began to grow.
She assessed her options in a matter of seconds while her heart beat heavily in her chest. She considered walking back down the road to confront whatever lay hiding behind the dumpster. Normally she liked to confront her fears, but here, alone in the deserted laneway, her feet remained rooted to the spot.
She continued walking down the lane, more briskly now, counting down the metres until she would escape into the light. She could see people there, and traffic whizzing by. She would be safe when she was amongst them and yet, she kept hearing the sounds behind her. They became less furtive as her follower kept pace.
She shouted over her shoulder, “Look, I know you’re back there, so stop fucking around ok?” She had hoped to sound bold and fearless, but her voice betrayed her and sounded like a nervous schoolgirl.
As she got to within fifty metres of the end of the lane her confidence started to return, however she heard more noises behind her, closer now. The sound scraped over her nerves like fingers down a blackboard. She couldn’t bring herself to turn around again and her hand went inside her bag and gripped the can of capsicum spray within.
“No, please God no,” she whispered frantically.
Within metres of safety, her eyes firmly fixed on the end of the street, she stepped in a small pot-hole. The left heel of her beloved Manolos snapped off with a crack and she fell heavily to the ground. She tried to get up quickly, but pain lanced through her ankle and she crumpled to the ground again. She looked around frantically for her bag. It had been flung from her grasp as she had desperately tried to cushion her fall with her palms, which were now bleeding and jarred from taking the brunt of her impact with the grimy road.
She looked back down the laneway and almost gasped as a figure appeared from the dark, moving quickly towards her. By some trick of the dim light, its shadow billowed up enormously behind it giving the appearance of some super-sized spectre.
Sarah scrambled the couple of metres that separated her from her bag, tearing holes in her stockings and scuffing her knees in the process. A full panic consumed her and her hands tore at her bag as she reached it, frantically searching its cluttered contents for the can of spray which eluded her grasp for a mad moment. After what seemed an eternity but in reality was only seconds, she grabbed the can and ripped the lid off it. She turned to face her assailant and was just in time to see a figure loom large over her.
“It’s a girl?”
Chapter 3
At eight p.m. on a Friday night Nero’s Lounge and Bar was vibrant, buzzing, bordering on noisy. Its modern cosmopolitan decor, location on Market Street in the city centre and remotely reasonable drink prices ensured its popularity as a Sydney night spot. Its clientele was mostly comprised of well paid Generation X and Y office workers who paid by card as they drank the pressures of their working week away. The main feature of Nero’s was a long marble clad bar running half the length of one of the side walls. There was row upon row of wine and spirit bottles stacked against the rear wall of the bar and fifteen premium local and imported beers on tap for good measure. The rest of the precious inner city floor space was filled with bar stools, lounges, coffee tables and a small stage in the rear corner for live gigs.
In the front left corner of the bar a group of five sat around a table. Through trial and error they had worked out that this was the quietest and most private spot in the place. Four of the group had just spent the last two hours stalking a stranger.
They meet at Nero’s every Friday evening to play their
