‘They’re all a part of this,’ she said. ‘You still don’t get it. It’s a system. You think bad things happen in the world because a couple of people decide to do them? You’re even dumber than I thought, Harry. Bad things happen because a couple of people do them and a bunch of people do nothing about it.’
Eric and Dylan. Elliot Rodger. Seung-Hui Cho. Each of them had been willing to take down innocents. People who hadn’t wronged them personally. When Day Zero came, it was all about rage. Consuming as many people as possible with it, making the point with suffering, whether those who suffered were innocent or guilty. I shivered. Bella walked close to me. We were two friends taking an evening stroll.
‘You think you and your brother got into the mess you’re in because of the actions of a couple of people?’ she asked.
No, I thought. She was right. Someone had killed those girls and set up my brother. I had to believe that. But there were other people who had made the whole situation complete. Nigel and his team had got it wrong and come after him, had squeezed a confession out of him, had locked him up and ignored other leads that had to have been there. Journalists had condemned him and the public had believed those journalists. Our own mother’s major concern had been making money from the situation. There was so much rage inside me, and I could share it among so many people. Including myself. I wasn’t there. I was in the middle of the road in some shitty town on the edge of nowhere about to die. I would be just another name in a long list of people who had not been there for Sam.
‘I think you want me to stop you, Bella,’ I said. ‘I think you left the diary for me to find. You took the plan page out, didn’t you? You didn’t want it to be too easy. You wanted to be able to carry on if I didn’t respond,’ I said. ‘But Bella, I’m responding now. You don’t have to go through with this.’
‘Shut up.’ She kicked me in the small of my back. I struggled not to fall. ‘The time for talking came and went a long time ago.’
Chapter 119
THE FIRST PEOPLE to notice us were a group of men I didn’t recognise, standing outside the pub, each with a beer glass in hand. They did what so many men do when they’re drunk and women come within orbit of them. They pointed and cheered. It must have been the expression on my face that shifted the mood. Cut the cheers short. Maybe it was the gun in Bella’s hand. I spied Kash outside the supply store with a pair of patrol officers. His mouth fell open.
People were coming nearer. Absurdly, bizarrely turning from their groups in the street and walking towards us, hypnotised moths attracted to a light. But Bella was nothing like the killer they’d imagined all along with her glittery heels and bright smile, her hair falling perfectly over her shoulders. Kash had his gun up in an instant. Bella waved the mobile phone high in the air. He understood. To the people around us, it was a stunt. A prank. They backed up, murmuring to each other, frowns, the occasional uncomfortable laugh.
I wanted to be sick, to cry out at the visions still flashing before me of Dez’s body slumping to the ground. Bella pushed me into the pub. It was crowded here, but quiet, a party ruined. She shoved me to the centre of the stage.
‘What a perfect place for this,’ she said. There was a strange self-consciousness to her now. Her plan materialising. How could it be this perfect? Surely something would bring it down. She was so used to her dreams being tugged back to Earth. ‘The pub, huh, Harry? We’ll do it here. This is where people come to forget about things, isn’t it? This is where we come to be together. Let’s all be together for this.’
‘Get down.’ Kash was waving people from the tables, directing them away from the stage. He kept his gun trained on Bella, his eyes never leaving her for long. ‘Stay calm, everyone. Move towards the exits.’
‘Do not move towards the fucking exits,’ Bella snapped, pointing my weapon at a group of people crouched by the door. ‘I’m running this show, you pathetic meathead. Get that fucking gun off me before I push this button and end your partner’s life.’
‘That device isn’t big enough to hurt anyone here but Harry.’ Kash pointed at me. ‘If you kill her, I’ll shoot you, and it’ll be over.’
‘Mmm.’ Bella nodded. Her bravado returned. ‘See, that’s where the plan gets interesting. This isn’t the only bomb in town.’
Chapter 120
WHITT KNEW HE was wrong when he turned the corner and came up against the blockade at the fork in the road. Huge red plastic barriers diverted cars off to the right, away from the river along Henry Lawson Drive. He pulled in slowly behind a driver who was checked and directed away, then flipped his badge open for the patrol cop manning the checkpoint. A light rain was beginning to fall.
‘Detective Whittacker,’ the cop read, shone the torch in Whitt’s face. ‘How can I help?’
‘I just want to do a quick check of the riverside. See if he’s out and about.’
‘He’s not.’ The young cop smiled. ‘We’ve got it blocked off from here to Timbuktu. They’re doing regular sweeps. But you’re welcome to go have a look.’
Whitt waved and rolled on, disappointed. Of course, someone got the idea before him that the killer might return to the Georges River, a place that obviously meant something to him. He got out and looked down the long, narrow stretch of parkland lining the black water. There were police everywhere, plain-clothes and patrollies leaning on trees, looking over maps, shining their torches along the muddy sand beyond the grey brick breakwall.
The stretch of river where the bodies of the girls had been found was no more than three hundred metres long. But Whitt thought that didn’t necessarily mean only that stretch was important to the killer. Much of the police presence was focused here, where the girls had been lain on the beach. Beyond this part of the river there was more parkland dotted with the occasional clearing where picnic tables and public toilet blocks stood, jungle gyms for the kids, public bins surrounded by thousands of beer-bottle caps and cigarette butts.
What was it about this place that meant so much to the killer? Whitt wondered as he walked in the dark between the trees, beyond the reach of the lights. He thought about critical places in his own life from his home in Perth, places that he could smell when he thought about them. Where the ghost of his child self still played on beaches, huddled into big armchairs in libraries and sifted through the crowded tables of treasures in public markets, his mother’s hand in his. Indeed, the only places he could think of that had any deep spiritual meaning for him had cemented themselves in his psyche during his childhood. The Georges River really was a boys’ wonderland. Dark forests that stretched for kilometres. Huge sandstone rock formations perfect for clambering on, hiding in and having secret conversations. The park was large enough that wild goats and deer populated its deeper parts, appearing on the road now and then. It would be a haven for teens smoking, making out, lighting fires.
Sam Blue had been fairly nonplussed about the place when Nigel’s team had asked him what associations he had with it. He said he’d hung out there now and then as a kid when placed with foster families in the area. He hadn’t been back in his adult years. It hadn’t struck the investigators as odd that the place where the three bodies of his victims had been found hadn’t meant much to their prime suspect. They’d assumed he was lying.
Whitt’s phone buzzed and he looked at the screen. A text message from the lab. He opened the image and looked at a face, one of the bearded men from the collection of photographs of suspects from the abandoned hotel. Regan Banks. Number eight. His DNA had matched the samples taken from under Tox’s fingernails.
Whitt spied a dark pier ahead reaching out into the water. There was a small boatshed near it. He headed that way, thinking he’d get out of the wind to make a phone call to Pops. He’d lost faith in his idea that the killer might be here at the river, with all the police presence nearby. He was only thinking now of his next angle of attack. The danger lying ahead escaped him.
Chapter 121