The Wave at Hanging Rock: A Psychological Mystery and Suspense Thriller (35 page)

“Are you ok? You look a little tired.”

Natalie blinked her eyes, and for a second it looked to Elaine like she was blinking back tears. “I’m fine.” When she saw that Elaine was still staring at her she added. “I’m sorry. Work’s a little stressful at the moment. That’s all.” Again the smile came, but this time it was even weaker than before.
 

Elaine tried to look sympathetic and understanding, then reversed a little to allow Natalie to come in the door. “Well do come in, let me get you a drink,” she said.
 

A little later and Elaine sat with her hands resting on the top of her wheels and watched them. Natalie and Dave, standing together and apart from everyone else. They both carried themselves the same way, shoulders tensed, heads a little bowed. Shooting glances around, as if to check no one could hear them. She kept on watching as one of the pilots wandered over to them, browsing for whatever might be cooked. He chatted for a while, flashing a white-teethed smile at the pretty Natalie, whose demeanour had changed suddenly. She was smilier now. Polite, but somehow still managing to make her body language dismissive. The man hung about for a minute but then walked away, glancing over his shoulder as he did so. Natalie had always drawn attention from the men.
Her
tragedy, the loss of a husband, somehow seemed to enhance that. The same certainly couldn’t be said for being left sitting in a wheelchair for life.
 

The thought gave her a bitter feeling. A vaguely familiar bitter feeling, and she wondered if there could be any other explanation than the thought hammering in her mind.
 

Could it be happening again?

Elaine started going out with Dave in sixth form college and they stayed a couple the whole time, until they split up and went to separate universities. Dave said it was because he couldn’t handle a long distance relationship, but Elaine suspected that the true reason was his dissatisfaction with the physical side of their relationship. Or rather the lack of. It wasn’t that they hadn’t slept together, but rather how long it had taken to build up to the event, how frequently she had stopped him, and when it had finally happened, how infrequently she seemed willing to repeat the performance. But throughout university they stayed as friends, and several years later, at a party they happened to attend together, they both drank too much and ended up back in bed together. Elaine vowed not to make the same mistake twice.
 

Now back together they did it frequently enough, she made sure of that, and she slowly learnt to relax. She could never quite make herself behave like the women in those magazines that she and her friends used to swap. But they grew together as a couple. They made it work for them, even if it was generally carried out in near-silence, with the lights off.

And then she had the accident. The long stay in hospital, the hopes that after her physical injuries healed she might regain some movement of her legs, the disappointment when that didn’t happen. Months afterwards a doctor sat down with her and talked about sex. It was a very matter-of-fact conversation, she was amazed at the time that the man could just sit there and talk with apparently no sense of awkwardness. It was all to do, he said, with how we have a set of nerves that links the genitals to the brain, totally separate to the spinal chord. He seemed fascinated by this, as if it were some brilliant extra on a new car. In some cases, the doctor told her, a person could feel an orgasm only in the parts of the body that had feeling left. A lucky few could experience orgasm in the whole body, just as they had before. But there were also an unlucky few, those who felt nothing.
 

Given how things had been before Elaine was pretty sure she knew which group she fell into, and perhaps such an attitude blocked the slim chance anyway. But sex became both very different and much less frequent, she just hoped that this time Dave would understand.
 

And then there had been that night. Dave was late back from the office, and she had just passed the test to drive the new car, adapted for her disability. So she decided to go for a drive. She’d surprise him at the office. She got there with no problems, but as she approached she saw there was nowhere to park - Jim’s car was there as well. So she stopped across the road. She was just about to start the long process of moving the chair to exit the car when she’d glanced across at the office, through the window, to see if Dave had noticed her.
 

Clearly he hadn’t. He was half-standing half-perched on his desk, Jim’s wife Natalie beside him. They looked - close - too close. As she watched he reached up and touched her face, and then they were kissing, his hands were all over her. Elaine’s hand went up to her mouth. She felt sick. Short of breath. She wanted to scream, she wanted to burst in there. But that would take ten minutes, and what would it achieve? She forced herself not to look again. She restarted the engine, left the lights off so they wouldn’t see her and drove away, slowing only a little at the junction with the main road. She never told him. She never challenged him about it. But she did understand. She looked now at how pretty Natalie looked standing there.
Standing.
Shapely legs shown off by her short summer dress.
 

Elaine thought of her own body and felt a sense of mourning for what she had been. But she forced herself to smile. We’re all animals, she repeated to herself. We all have our needs. And she accepted that it was probably happening again.

forty-four

DAVE AND ELAINE’S party was just about the last place Natalie wanted to go, four days after learning how her husband had died, and that the man who killed him continued to pose a threat to her and her family. But since she could tell no one, she had no reason not to go. She considered faking sickness, but a text message from Dave changed her mind.
 

Are you coming tomorrow? I have to speak with you.

Natalie walked through the house in a daze. Most of the guests were gathered on the patio, outside the kitchen. A band were playing and the garden was strewn with chairs and loungers, many occupied and pulled into smaller circles. Natalie knew most of the people there, at least by sight, it was the same crowd each year. She nodded to a couple, but didn’t go over to speak to them. She saw her sister further away, where the lawn gave way to the kidney shaped pool, shouting at the boys not to splash people. Normally she’d have joined them, but she’d spotted Dave, by the BBQ, a little out of the way by the fence, Dave with his back to the party.
 

He turned and saw her, then watched as she walked over. He looked like a man incapable of smiling.
 

She saw what he was grilling, strips of marinated steak, skewers of vegetables and prawns, thick sausages.

“Hi. You want something?” He said.

“Not really.”

“Me neither. Kind of hard to get in the party mood isn’t it?”

She smiled, the same weak smile she had earlier, but with Dave it had more understanding in it.
 

Dave turned back to the grill. He gripped one sausage with his tongs and gave it a quarter turn, then worked his way down the rest doing the same. When he’d finished Natalie was still there. Watching him.

“Have you thought any more about what you want to do?”
 

“I’ve thought about nothing else,” Natalie said. “I still don’t know.”

There was a table next to the grill, a heavy concrete plinth supported by a wall of bricks at each end and inlaid with terracotta tiles. Dave’s drink rested on one of them, a tumbler of something, the syrupy swirl of its alcohol evident even though Natalie couldn’t tell what it was. He lifted it now and swirled the ice around before taking a sip.

“Get you a drink?”

“I’m driving.”

“I’ll get you one anyway. We need to talk.”

By the time he’d handed her a tumbler of strong gin and tonic the food on the BBQ was ready, and a raggedy, jovial queue formed. Natalie picked at a plate of salad for the sake of it and joined her sister at the pool. The boys were diving. They’d come prepared with goggles and could swim the length of the pool underwater. She sat astride a sun lounger and nursed her drink, glancing over at Dave. When all the food was cooked he looked for her, nodded, and then disappeared inside.
 

“I’m not sure I can keep this up. Nothing seems real anymore.” They were upstairs where Dave had a small office, its window overlooked the back garden. The decoration was all Dave, presumably since it was hard for Elaine to get up there. Natalie was sitting in his chair, a leather high-backed executive model festooned with adjustment levers. He was leaning against the plain white wall, a drink in his hand. It was her that had spoken.

“I can’t talk to people. They don’t even seem real. It’s like I’m living in a bad dream.”

Dave breathed heavily. “I know.”
 

A silence drew out between them.
 

“And if that wasn’t bad enough, I think Elaine suspects we’re having an affair or something. She keeps staring at me.”

“I know.”

“So what was it you wanted to say?” Natalie asked.

He gave another sigh. Then he rolled his head back and looked at the ceiling. He stared at it for a very long time before he began to speak.
 

“I don’t know a way to say this,” he said at last. “Once these words come out I can’t take them back. And I’ve thought of a dozen ways to begin, but every one seems wrong.” Dave didn’t go on but he turned to look at her. The expression on his face was ominous. It scared her.

“You want to do what Jesse says don’t you?” She shook her head away from his gaze. “You want to bloody kill him.”

“No. Of course I don’t,” he said quickly. “I don’t want to. There’s nothing I want less. But…” Dave stroked his chin. He’d shaved for the party. It made him look even more tired.
 

“Look, the way I wanted to put it is like this. The law allows a person to… to
kill
,” he lowered his voice on the word, “to kill another person if it’s in self defence. And that’s the situation we find ourselves in. Through no fault of our own, that’s just the truth of it. Our lives and the lives of entirely innocent people are at risk if we don’t act. Now normally the correct course of action would be to go to the police, but in this case, we can’t.”

“I agree with you.”

“I simply cannot believe I find myself saying this out loud, but… What?”

“I agree with you. If we could do it, it would be the only way out of this.”

Now Dave turned around to look at her.
 

“It
would
be?”

“If we could, yes.”

Dave checked her eyes, confusion had edged into his expression.
 

“I think, Natalie.” He stopped. Breathed hard for a moment. “If we’re seriously going to consider this… option. We need to talk in certainties. It
can
be done.”

She didn’t answer but she kept her eyes on him.

There was a small leather sofa on the back wall and he walked over and flopped down in it, his head back. He talked to the ceiling above her head.
 

“I need to tell you something. I need to tell you a story. Will you hear me out?”

She shrugged. “Yeah. OK.”

“You know when I really worked out that life is unfair? Really fundamentally unfair? It was after Elaine’s accident. Not the accident itself, that was just bad luck. But afterwards. The police hardly even looked for the driver. Did you know that? It was before the days when everything was covered by CCTV I suppose. Maybe it would have been different if Elaine had remembered more of the car. Maybe if there’d been a witness. But there wasn’t. It was dark, it hit her from behind. The bastard never stopped. And once the police realised there were no clues. When no one turned themselves in, that was it. But
he’d
have known of course. You don’t drive straight through someone on a pedestrian crossing and not notice.”

Dave glanced down to check Natalie was still listening.
 

“They gave up on the case before she even came home from hospital. They moved onto things they could solve. It didn’t even matter who her father was. She would never walk again, she couldn’t have children. That didn’t matter to them. The driver got away with no punishment at all. Maybe a dented bumper. A few sleepless nights maybe.” He glanced at her again.

 
“For years I thought about the man driving that car.” At this he dropped his eyes from the ceiling and stared at her. “Or the woman, it might have been a woman, but for some reason I always pictured him as a man. And I fantasied about what I would do if I ever found him. Not if I ever had proof of what he’d done. I never once fantasied about reporting him to the police. That wasn’t the kind of justice I wanted. My fantasies were always about what
I
would do to him. At first it was more about doing to him what he had done to Elaine. Something to do with all those Catholic masses my parents made me sit through I suppose, an eye for an eye. A baseball bat for a hit and run. But that never seemed practical. Actually it never seemed
fair
. All that would do was land me in prison. I’d lose again. Elaine would lose again. So I began to think instead about
removing
him. Killing him I suppose.” Again his voice quietened on the word. He stopped again and this time he stared down at his hand. It was resting on the arm of the sofa but still holding his drink, but his hand was shaking so violently the ice was rattling against the glass. He leaned forward and set it down.
 

“It seemed harmless, helpful even, these fantasies. An outlet for my frustrations. I never thought it was real. I never thought I’d actually find him, how could I? But even so I’d work out how to do it, so I wouldn’t get caught.” Dave began to smile now. An ironic smile.

“And it’s entertaining, it’s like a puzzle. Working out how you might do it. A puzzle with an infinite number of right answers. I could spend hours thinking about it. I whiled away many a long flight thinking how it might be done. And once it’s done in cold blood, once your victim doesn’t even know you’re coming for him - it’s not so hard. Not once you commit yourself. So it’s not a question of
could
we do it. The question is should we?”