She walked across the bank foyer to the doors. Hope didn’t count on Ken’s blood having run so quickly from his wounds in Yim’s office. As Hope walked towards freedom, her stolen high heels left a series of red triangles in her wake on the huge white marble tiles. Hope looked up just as the teller at the end of the row noticed them, her frown deepening as she tried to work out how the customer could have walked in red paint inside the bank.
The two women’s eyes met just as Hope reached the door.
‘Excuse me, miss,’ the teller called. ‘Miss!’
Hope turned and ran.
She fitted through the glass doors as they snapped shut just at the last second, the edges catching her shirt, tearing the soft fabric. The crowd parted as she waved the gun in the air.
‘Get out of the way! Move!’
There was a taxi on the corner. Perfect timing. Hope was going to make it through this. She was going to see that sunrise on the ocean. No one was going to stop her.
CHAPTER 44
ON THE WAY back to the station, stopped at the traffic lights at Elizabeth Street, three patrol cars zipped through the red signal in front of us, sirens blaring. An ambulance was hot on their tail. They were heading towards Martin Place at an incredible speed. I’d been trying to get Chris Murray on the phone, but he wouldn’t answer. Finally I took Tox’s phone and dialled, hoping Murray wouldn’t recognise the number.
‘Chris Murray.’
‘Murray you asshole,’ I said, ‘you’ve been ignoring my calls!’
‘I don’t have time for your calls,’ he snapped back.
We yelled into the phone at the same time: ‘I’ve found the yachties!’
We were both panting with excitement, struggling through the confusion.
‘What?’ Chris said.
‘I’ve found the missing couple,’ I stammered. ‘Well, I know who knows where they are. I’m tailing a suspect, a prostitute named Hope Stallwood, in my drowning case. I think Hope and my victim Claudia Burrows were working together to steal your couple’s boat. Claudia ended up as excess baggage, maybe got dumped when the scam was over. Probably your yachties, too.’
‘Well, I’m hoping you’re wrong about that,’ Murray said. ‘Because a young Caucasian female has just tried to access the couple’s bank account in Martin Place. And they tell me that whoever she is, she wasn’t alone.’
‘Jesus Christ! That must be her!’
‘I’m on my way right now,’ Murray said.
‘I’ll see you there.’ I grabbed Tox just as we set off across the lights. ‘Turn the car around,’ I told him. ‘Head back towards Martin Place.’
CHAPTER 45
WE RAN ACROSS the crowded square and pushed through the ring of people at the police tape around the bank. The alarms inside were still squealing, but the big glass doors were open and cops were running in and out. One passed me with his hands covered in blood, rubbing them on the front of his shirt, looking dazed.
I knew Hope was on the edge. Anyone who had lived for long enough in the kind of environment she had was probably pretty close to manic-depressive.
I spend so much of my job hoping I’m wrong. I hoped, as I pushed through the crowd, that somehow I’d made a mistake while joining the dots. Connecting the yachting magazine to the missing couple who had disappeared at sea. Maybe I was jumping to conclusions – leaping down a rabbit hole that would take me nowhere. I hoped I’d walk into the bank manager’s office and find the missing couple there, safe.
I wasn’t so lucky.
There was a man in his fifties on his back on the marble floor, bleeding to death in a huddle of paramedics. He’d been shot or stabbed, it looked like. The situation was so desperate that the paramedics had forgone getting him to the hospital and were trying to stem the bleeding right there, in front of everyone. There were female bank tellers in snappy red suits crying in each other’s arms. I grabbed one and yanked her away from the tearful huddle.
‘Who is he?’
‘I don’t know.’ She wiped her running mascara. ‘He came in with her, the shooter. They were a couple. Mr Yim saw them in the office. We didn’t hear the gunshots. They walked in together, and then she walked out. Someone saw blood and went in and found them.’
I turned the corner and glanced into Yim’s office. He was slumped against the back wall, his face grey, a bullet hole in his neck. Two men were holding a dark jacket against his wounds. But it was clearly over.
I heard the man on the ground struggling against the paramedics assisting him.
‘She’s still on board!’ he cried, taking gasps of breath. ‘She’s got her! She’s got my wife!’
CHAPTER 46
HOPE LEANED AGAINST the bridge wall and kept the gun on Jenny, watched out the windows as the other yachties lounged and talked on their own vessels. Soon the cops would swarm the piers looking for her, a black and poisonous cloud rolling out over the water, stifling the afternoon sun. She’d be long gone before they arrived. Jenny was not in good shape. She clung to the helm shakily, her head nodding gently as waves of exhaustion rolled through her. Hope told Jenny to fire the engines and guided her on the throttle. The older woman’s hands were so slick with sweat she could hardly grip the wheel.
‘I’m sorry it has to be this way,’ Hope said. ‘This is probably going to be awful for your family.’
‘Where is Ken?’ Jenny whimpered.
‘Put on port five.’ Hope waved at the helm. ‘Bring the throttle back a bit.’
‘I have two grown sons,’ Jenny said. ‘They have children.’
‘I don’t care.’
‘Just tell me if Ken is still alive,’ Jenny pleaded. ‘Tell me what happened. I have to know.’
Hope hardly heard the sick woman at the helm. For many years, Hope had been thinking about people in terms of how they related to her ‘Circle of Care’. A wide ring around her shut people out, or welcomed them in. It encompassed the people who were her responsibility, those she could trust, those it was safe to love. The circle had shrunk a little when she was a child every time her father had beaten her, so that the man had slipped out of it completely in time. When he’d grown old and mild, always moaning about forgiveness and mistakes, Hope hadn’t been able to bring herself to pull the man back inside the circle. For a while, in her teenage years, there had been friends and boyfriends inside the circle, but they’d walked out steadily as she’d taken to drinking and partying. When she’d started working in the Cross, she’d looped that small but loving circle around the other girls in her brothel. Together they’d got through the long nights and sleepy days, pulled each other up from the depths when it all became too much, watched out for the telltale track marks that meant someone was losing control.
But when Hope had been kicked out of the brothel for hiding profits from her madam, she’d found herself and Claudia the only two people left in the circle. And Hope was so used to people walking out, or being squeezed out, that she had really just been waiting all the time for Claudia’s turn to leave. And that turn had come when she’d fulfilled her role in taking down the Spellings. Hope had had no use for her after that. She wasn’t part of the glorious plan.
The circle was closed. Strangers like Jenny didn’t have a chance. Hope directed the older woman to rev the engines when the bow was pointing to clear, empty horizon. Behind them Hope could see cops arriving on the pier. They’d stopped the taxi driver before he could get out of the marina. It was a close call, but Hope was getting ahead of them. Maybe she’d make it. There were plenty of heavy things on board to tie Jenny to if she got in trouble.
CHAPTER 47
I PICKED A vessel close to the end of the pier and shuffled the old couple who were having tea on the back deck off it. The water police in Sydney Harbour were gearing up, and the coastguard was sending a chopper. The radio I’d taken from a patrol cop at the bank was roaring with dozens of voices coordinating things here and there. A hostage negotiator teaching young criminologists at the University of
Sydney was being pulled out of a lecture and driven at top speed towards the coast.
I stopped Tox on the back deck.
‘Maybe you should stay,’ I said.
‘What?’ he scoffed. ‘Fuck off.’
‘Look,’ I said, ‘this is our case. We don’t want it fucked up by idiot water police guys who insist on ignoring us because you’re on board. If you’re not around, I’ve got a chance of having some pull out there. I want control of the situation.’
‘I’m not leaving this case.’ Tox pushed me away. ‘Get on the helm and shut up.’
‘They’re going to fuck with us out there, and lose us our suspect,’ I said. ‘Tox, you’re a murderer!’
‘I’m a killer, not a murderer!’ he shouted. ‘There’s a difference, Detective Blue.’
I stared at him. He was ignoring me. He worked the helm like an expert, bringing the boat out of its mooring and turning it towards the sea in a seamless glide while its owners railed at us from the pier. I didn’t know what to say. He glanced at me.
‘I don’t care that people don’t like me,’ he said. ‘I deserve some punishment. But I don’t drop cases, and I don’t lose suspects.’
I opened my mouth to answer, but nothing came out. He gestured to the throttle.
‘Get moving.’ He looked to the horizon. ‘We’ve got to catch up and talk her down before she does something stupid and kills the hostage.’
The police radio channels separated. I got onto a channel with the water police and Chris Murray. The coastguard hung back and let us take charge, three boats behind a row of five police cruisers and Tox’s and my commandeered leisure yacht. We lost sight of land quickly. The freshly painted New Hope grew larger as we inched closer.
It was an hour of slow, restless following before Hope finally answered repeated pleas to talk over the radio. She came through loud and clear on the channel reserved for the police.
‘I’ve got Jenny Spelling tied to a compressor,’ she said. ‘She’s going overboard if you get any closer.’
CHAPTER 48
THE COMMAND TEAM, led by Chris Murray, said nothing about Hope’s progress out to sea. As long as she was talking, Murray seemed happy to let her trundle on ahead of us. But I wanted Hope to stop. While she was underway, she thought she was shifting closer and closer to being free, and I knew negotiations would last longer while she felt she had the upper hand. Jenny Spelling was sick. She wouldn’t last a twelve-hour siege. I shifted in beside Tox at the helm and pointed to the New Hope.
‘Come up alongside her,’ I said. ‘Keep your distance, like she said. Don’t get any closer.’
I went out of the bridge and down the steps to the back of our vessel. There was a tarp to protect the deck from the rain, hanging over the rear of the galley. I tore that down. I dragged a net out of a box on the deck and then went inside, grabbed sheets and blankets from the bed and lugged them out onto the deck.
Hope’s vessel slowly loomed up beside me. All the lights were on. I could see the young woman standing at the helm, looking out. I couldn’t make out her expression. Jenny was on the other side of her, just her feet visible near a gap in the wall outside the bridge.
‘I don’t know what this boat is doing out to my starboard side.’ Hope’s voice was high with tension on the radio. ‘But I want them to fuck off.’
‘What are you doing?’ Tox shouted at me.
‘Go round the front!’
The engines roared beneath me. I copped a hit of sea spray in the face as the boat lurched over the waves. As we came across Hope’s bow, I waited until the right moment and then began hurling the sheets, blankets, tarp and net into the sea.
‘What the fuck?’ Hope screamed on the radio.
I hung on as we took a huge wave to the starboard side, crossing over to Hope’s port side.
I didn’t know if my plan had worked immediately. There was no discernible crunch of the propellers as they became tangled in the debris I’d put right in Hope’s path. After a while, I noticed her boat was slowing. There was smoke on the wind.
I looked up in time to see Hope on the port side, standing over Jenny as she lay helpless on the deck. As I watched, Hope looked back towards the boats behind her and raised the radio to her mouth.
‘You shouldn’t have done that,’ Hope said. ‘Now I’ll have to punish her.’
CHAPTER 49
HOPE UNSCREWED THE silencer and threw it over the side. The gunshot cracked over the ocean, rolling and echoing on the waves. Jenny didn’t move. Hope’s voice was impossibly high on the radio, the screech of a deranged woman.
‘You do not want to fuck with me right now!’ Hope said. ‘This woman is really sick. It won’t take more than a couple of shots to finish her off!’
‘Fucking psychopath,’ I seethed. Hope turned and popped off five shots at us. One clanged off the roof of the boat, mere inches from Tox’s head. I threw myself to the deck and listened. Tox veered the boat away.
‘Good move with the tarps,’ Tox said as I crawled back into the bridge.
‘Detective Blue, that was a bloody senseless move,’ Chris Murray blasted on the radio. He wanted the water police to hear that he didn’t agree with the risk I’d just taken, in case it caused Hope to kill her hostage. He also wanted Hope to know she had a good cop to trust, now that it was clear who the bad one was. I switched over to the coastguard channel to talk back to him privately.
‘She won’t kill her,’ I said. ‘Not yet.’
‘Your actions have caused the hostage injury!’ Chris snapped.
‘Jenny Spelling didn’t move an inch when that gun fired,’ I said. ‘I reckon Hope’s bluffing. Probably put a hole in the deck. She can’t risk the only leverage she’s got.’
Chris switched back to Hope’s channel.
‘Hope Stallwood, this is Detective Christopher Murray. The detective who disabled your engines acted completely without authority.’
Hope’s voice came over the radio: ‘Detective, your people are going to get an innocent woman killed. Is that what you want? Now you’re going to have to provide me with another vessel. If you don’t start listening to me I’m going to kill her. OK? I’m going to murder her right in front of you!’
She was almost screaming. Murray needed to bring her tension levels down before she did anything stupid. I’d raised them to manic level, but it had been worth the risk. The water police and coastguard vessels were slowly manoeuvring around the front of the New Hope, trying to box her in while she was distracted.
‘Hope, we’re going to need you to tell us what condition Mrs Spelling is in,’ Murray said. ‘We can’t see what’s going on. Did you wound her just now?’
There was silence for a long time. Hope was focused on her victim. She wandered down the bridge a little, turned and paced back. Her face was taut. Jenny’s legs were moving. I could see her knees jostling through the gap in the bridge wall.
‘There’s something wrong with her,’ Hope’s voice crackled on the radio, frighteningly calm. ‘She’s having some kind of seizure.’
CHAPTER 50
‘WHAT EXACTLY’S WRONG with her?’ Tox asked.
‘Murray said she’s got some kind of kidney thing,’ I said. ‘I don’t think she’s had her medication. That’s how the family knew something was up. Why they reported them missing.’
My whole body ached to be on that boat. Though she wasn’t giving us any details, I knew Hope could have wounded Jenny with that gunshot, just to mess with us. The shot could have tipped Jenny over the edge into a seizure.
Hope walked to the end of the upper level of the boat and looked at the vessels ringing her, paced back again and stared at her victim, now still.
‘Hope, are you willing to let us send a medic on board?’ Murray said.
Hope went to the end of the boat again, lifted her gun and started firing. I ducked, but she wasn’t firing at us this time. Murray’s boat had been carried forward a little further than the others as we came to a stop behind t
he New Hope, and she was warning him back. I saw all three officers on board dive for the deck.
‘Girl’s gonna run out of bullets in a minute,’ Tox grunted.
He was right. Hope stopped firing and returned to the bridge. When she reappeared she had a hunting rifle in her hand. She pointed it skyward and fired at the coastguard chopper, which was hovering high above us. She only gave it one shot. This was probably her last gun.
‘Move back!’ her voice screeched on the radio. Murray put his boat in reverse and came into line with the rest of us.
Every second of growing darkness was agonising. Jenny wasn’t moving. A couple of times, rogue officers on the water police boats tried to creep forward into the circle we’d established around the New Hope. But she spotted them soon enough and forced them back.
I could see the air compressor she’d tied Jenny to. A third of the heavy, squat machine was hanging off the edge of the boat, just beyond the gap in the bridge wall. When she felt threatened, Hope would go to the machine and rattle it, push it further over the edge and then pull it back. I waited for Jenny to move. She didn’t.
I couldn’t take it any longer. All of the vessels around the New Hope had their spotlights trained on the water around the hull. I got an idea, and flicked ours off.
‘What’s the plan now, genius?’ Tox asked.
I switched radio channels onto the coastguard channel, so that Hope couldn’t hear me. I radioed the three coastguard boats spread throughout the circle.
‘Coastguard, coastguard, this is Detective Harriet Blue, over.’
‘Coastguard here.’
‘Can you guys wait a few minutes, then switch your lights off? I’m trying to set up a path in, over.’