The Wave at Hanging Rock: A Psychological Mystery and Suspense Thriller (27 page)

“Turn the ignition on,” he said. “You need it on or the dial doesn’t register.”
 

I realised he was right and when I turned the key the needle climbed at once to just over half full.
 

“See? I told you,” Darren began but I told him to shut the fuck up.
 

“Half a tank.” I said to John, hoping the plan was going to be finding somewhere to ditch the car long before we used all that up. But he didn’t answer, he was flicking through the map, his lips were moving as ideas ran through his head.

“I’ve got it.” He turned to me with a grim look on his face. “It’s a bit of a trip though.”

“A bit of a trip?” I said, feeling sick now. “Where we going?”
 

“Buckle up. We’re going to the Badlands.”

You know I’ve read a bit about murders and murderers since then. You could say I developed an interest in it, that’s understandable isn’t it? Anyway, it turns out that the reason most murderers who get caught do so because they make silly mistakes. They panic basically. They don’t think things through. They get rid of the evidence as quickly as they can, instead of as carefully as they can. It’s understandable, believe me I know, you get scared, you don’t want to be there, dealing with what’s happened. You take shortcuts. That was what me and Darren were like, but John wasn’t. And that’s what made him so good that day. His arm must have been killing him, but he hardly mentioned it. He wasn’t panicking, he was thinking. So he wasn’t making mistakes. And to come up with the plan he did, that young, that inexperienced, that was nothing short of genius. The only problem was it meant I had to drive most of the night.

“What are you talking about? What are we going there for?”

“OK Listen. He’s a surfer right? This guy. He’s here on his own. He
told
us no one knows he’s here. So he could be surfing anywhere. So where’s the most dangerous place to surf?”

Both Darren and me stayed quiet, blank looks on our faces.

“The Badlands. You’re asking for trouble if you surf there, everyone knows that. We just have to leave the car somewhere in the Badlands. When they find this guy missing they’ll think that the locals there did him. That’s where they’ll look for the body.”

I wasn’t thinking that far ahead though. “Cornwall? You want me to drive to Cornwall?”

 
John looked at the map before answering. “It’s three hours. Three and a half tops. You’ll be alright.”

“But I’ve never driven further than the village.”

“We’ll be fine. We’ll do it together. But we’ve got to go to the campsite first to get his stuff.”

I didn’t say anything. All I was thinking was I had to drive this car for four hours. For a moment I wondered if I could come up with a plan of my own to stop this madness, but I knew I could never outthink John. I stared out the windscreen for a little while then I started the engine.
 

There was no one else on the road but I still indicated to pull out, might as well start out properly. I pulled away, revving a little high and Darren started telling me what to do from the back.
 

“You’re still in first gear. You’ve got to change gear.”

“Fuck off. I know. I’m changing now.”

“That’s fourth. You’ve put it in fourth. It’s going to stall.”

“Fuck off Darren.”

John was just sitting there giving me this encouraging look, willing me to do this.
 

I drove the mile or so back down the road to the campsite and slowed just outside the gate. I could see Mum’s car was there parked outside the house. John flipped down the sun visors and told me to keep going, over to where the guy’s tent was pitched. I swallowed hard and did what he said. There was a little turn you had to make right by the house where you had to slow right down. We always used to glance out the kitchen window to see who was coming, whether they’d paid, whatever. I tried to get a bit of a run up to get through here fast, but I messed it up. I tried to change gear just before and missed it, and the engine juddered and stalled. We all just sat there staring at the kitchen window to see if Mum’s face would appear. Even John looked worried, but he stayed calm and told me to push the clutch down and try the engine again. It wouldn’t catch, just kept turning over with us sitting there right outside mum’s kitchen window. There was washing on our little line. Mum was definitely there.
 

“You’re gonna flood it Jesse,” Darren said. My hands were shaking. I knew she was going to come out at any moment to see what the noise was.
 

“Calm down,” John said. “Slowly.” He reached across and put his good hand on my arm. “Try it once more.”

It was like the car did what he told it, just like we did. The engine caught and I pulled away like old people do, the clutch still half in, the engine revving way too hard, but we moved forward.
 

I pulled up at the tent so the car was between it and the house.

“Fucking hell that was close,” Darren said, and I just collapsed forward on the steering wheel, but John was onto the next challenge.

“Careful when you open the tent,” he said. “We don’t know for sure there’s no one in it.
 

So I got out again and looked around a bit. It didn’t look like anyone was there but I called out a tentative ‘hello’ and gave the tent a bit of a shake. No one shouted back, so I slowly unzipped the tent door. I don’t know what I would have done if there’d been someone in there. I expect John would have thought of something.
 

It was empty apart from a camp mat and a sleeping bag and a few clothes scattered around, they guy wasn’t exactly camping in luxury, but that was good as it meant we could pack his stuff up more quickly. I ran around the tent pulling out pegs so it flopped down onto the grass. John opened the Nissan’s boot and got me and Darren throwing things in, putting the tent away neatly because John told us we had to make it look normal. When it was done I shut the boot and we all climbed back in. I put my shaking hands back on the wheel. That’s when I had an idea.
 

We had to drive right through the village to get to the main road. And there’s a police station at the end of the main street. Wherever John wanted us to go, we had to drive right past it. I suddenly realised there was nothing John could do if I stopped. If I stopped and got out and ran inside and told them what had happened, then it wasn’t too late. For John maybe but not for me. If I drove John right to them, surely I wasn’t an accessory to murder or whatever John was saying I was. I’d be a hero. The boy who caught a murderer. That was all I was thinking as we left the campsite and drove up to the village. I had to do it. I wasn’t even thinking about the driving by then, just whether or not I could get out the car in time. But as we approached the police station and I slowed a bit, I could feel it was written all over my face what I wanted to do. I felt like he must be reading my mind.
 

“What are you doing Jesse?” He gave me this look. I’d seen it plenty of times before, like when he wanted me to get more wood for the fire, or finish off a rabbit that had got caught in our traps. But it was darker this time.
 

“Why are you slowing down?”

The truth is I just didn’t have the nerve to do it. With his broken arm I could have stopped and run in there to the police - how was he gonna stop me - but my courage let me down.
 

“I’m not. I’m just keeping to the speed limit. We don’t want to get busted for speeding do we?”

He kept that look fixed on me for a long while, until we were all the way out of town. I couldn’t stop then, it was way too late.
 

That trip, Jesus Christ. I’ll never forget that trip. At first there weren’t any junctions and we just had to follow the road. Even so I got a little traffic jam on my tail, and on every straight bit people overtook me and honked their horns. Then we got to the motorway, and we either went so fast I thought we were going to crash, or so slow cars nearly piled into the back of us. I nearly freaked out so much John had me stop at the first services. He made me drink coffee and talked to me until I calmed down. He also bought aspirin or something, for his arm. He took four pills dry as soon as he got in the car and then he wound down the window and popped all the rest out of the packet onto the road. Then he did the same with a second packet, but he threw the boxes on the floor of the car.
 

“What you doing?” Darren asked him.

“A little misdirection,” he said. “Come on. We gotta get going.”
 

That trip took easily double what John had said it would. We pretty nearly all died around Cardiff when a lorry joined the motorway, I didn’t know I was supposed to get out of the way and it fired it’s air horn at us, which made me swerve right across into the fast lane. I went right over the path of this old volvo and I could see the driver, white faced with shock fighting the steering wheel to keep control. But slowly I kind of got the hang of it.

Even so it was way past midnight when we even got into Cornwall, and the Badlands were way down the bottom. John took us to a beach called Porthtowan. I wasn’t really part of the conversation by then, just following the white lines and going whichever way John told me to go. We found a car park overlooking the beach. There was no one around of course, it was three in the morning by then but even so we parked it in the corner, right out of the way.
 

The idea was to dump the car there, but it was pretty cold so John told us to get some sleep first, and I was so tired I was out straight away. The next thing I knew it was getting light and John was shaking me awake. He made me pull some clothes from the guy’s bag in the boot, and leave them on the passenger seat, like you’d do if you were surfing. Then John made us wipe everything to get rid of fingerprints. Then he told me to lock the car and hide the keys. As I was kneeling down to do so there was this massive bang and glass started falling about my ears. As if I wasn’t shaken up enough by that point.

“What the fuck was that?” I said rolling back on the floor. John was standing above me, looking into the passenger window that he’d just stoved in with a brick.

“What the fuck did you do that for?” I asked.

“I told you, a little misdirection. “ Then he said:

“Come on. Let’s see if we can find some breakfast and get outta here.”

 
It was still so early we had to wait a bit, but eventually we found somewhere that did a full English, and me and Darren ate while John figured out how to get us back home. We got a bus first, I don’t remember where to, but then we got on a train up to Bristol, and then Carmarthen. Again I slept most of the way. But when we got there John made us leave the station and go to the high street. We went into every shop that looked like it might sell fireworks and we bought as many as they’d sell us. It was coming up to bonfire night so there were loads available. John did all the talking, he passed for eighteen pretty easily by then, and it cost a load, but like everything else he just put it on his credit card. If I’d known he had access to so much money I’d have stopped him stealing so much from the campsite shop. Anyway. He bought so much I had to make more room in my bag by snapping the sticks off from the rockets and throwing them away. We didn’t get back on the bus until we each had a backpack filled to bursting with fireworks.

It was too late by the time we finally got back to the village so we sneaked into the campsite and spent the night in our caravan, not putting the lights on in case Mum saw we were there and came out to offer us food or something. I don’t think any of us slept much.
 

 
John woke us up at first light again. He looked tired that day. His arm was all sorts of blue and purple and swollen so it was twice the size it should have been. For a moment I didn’t think he was going to be able to go through with it, and that scared me, the thought that Darren and me might have to do it on our own. But he fitted his sling again and got on with it. He made me sneak over and get all the petrol from the campsite’s sit-on mower, then we had to hike back out to the Rock. It was fucking heavy carrying it all. Our last expedition to the wave at Hanging Rock.

It seemed unreal walking down there that day. It was a stunning dawn, the sun rose up behind us and the oranges and reds and browns of the leaves were crisp against the lightening sky. It made it all the more ridiculous what we were setting out to do. I remember thinking I didn’t want that walk to end. I didn’t want to see what I knew we’d find at the end of it. I don’t exactly believe in God but I was praying that somehow the guy hadn’t been dead after all, that he’s woken up from his trance, scrabbled around to put his teeth back in and walked off somewhere. That maybe all we’d really done wrong was steal the guy’s car.
 

But when we arrived back at the foot of the Hanging Rock it was all like we’d left it. The only difference was it looked like some animals had been in the cave and had a go at the body. It’s not like he was hard to find I guess.
 

 
We all sat down around the bags of fireworks and one by one, we opened each one up and poured the black power into Darren’s backpack. We filled it up and then packed it down hard, we got maybe twenty kilos of the stuff in there. Then John carried it to the bottom of the crack behind the Hanging Rock and wedged it in as far as he could reach. He poured half the petrol into the bag as well, so that it sagged and it sat there in a stinking oily puddle. Then he laid out one of the ropes we used to anchor the lobster pot as a fuse, splashing that with petrol as well. He was concentrating so hard the whole time he didn’t speak. Darren and me just stood there watching and waiting.
 

“Ready?” John stood half way between us and the towering Hanging Rock, at the end of his trail of rope and petrol. He held his lighter in his hand.

For a moment I was taken back to the last time I saw my Dad, and I thought that it would be kind of ironic if this was the last time I saw John alive as well. But I just shrugged like I didn’t care anymore and then nodded.