Challis returned to his lathe work. Behind him, Kitty began to remove the sludge from the engine block. It was companionable working with her. Challis felt some of the blackness lift away. He didn’t have to account for himself here. He didn’t have to apologise for, or hide, his obsession with the Dragon. Here it was as if he didn’t carry his whiff of people who had died terribly or committed terrible things. He was simply Hal Challis, who liked to fly aeroplanes and was restoring a 1930s Rapide.
The moon was out when he finally drove home. The eyes of small animals gleamed in his headlights. The telephone was ringing in his hallway.
‘Yes.’ He never said his name.
‘Hal?’
His sense of calm left him. Some of the day’s badness came leaking in to take its place. He dropped onto the little stool beside the phone. ‘Hello, Ange.’
She didn’t speak for a while. ‘An early Merry Christmas, Hal.’
‘You, too.’
‘I thought, I might not get an opportunity to ring you next week. Everyone here will be hogging the phones on Christmas Day, so I thought, why not call you tonight, get in early.’
‘Good thinking,’ Challis said. He wished he had a drink. ‘Look, Ange, I’ll take this in the kitchen, okay?’
‘If this is a bad time I’ll-’
‘No, now’s fine, just wait a moment while I go to the kitchen.’
He poured Scotch into a glass, stood the glass on the bench top, stared a moment at the wall phone next to the fridge, then let out his breath.
‘I’m back, Ange.’
‘I’m trying to picture your house.’
‘It’s just a house.’
A catch in her voice. ‘Not that I’ll ever see the inside of it.’
‘Ange, I-’
‘I imagine somewhere peaceful and quiet. I miss that.’
‘Yes.’
‘I’m not a bad person, Hal. Not deep down inside.’
‘I know you’re not.’
‘Temporary madness.’
‘Yes.’
‘I can’t really believe it all happened like that. Like a bad dream.’
‘Yes.’
‘You do forgive me, don’t you?’
‘I forgive you.’
The answers came automatically. He’d been giving them for years.
She said, in a wondering voice: ‘You’re an unusual man, Hal. Other husbands wouldn’t forgive their wives, not for something like that.’
Challis swallowed his drink. ‘So, Ange, will your mum and dad come on Christmas Day?’
‘Change the subject, why don’t you? Mum will, Dad won’t. He doesn’t want to know me.’ She broke down. ‘God, seven years, and he hasn’t been once to see me.’
Challis let her cry herself out.
‘You still there, Hal?’
‘I’m here.’
The night was still and dark. The house was like an echoing shell around him.
‘You don’t say much.’
‘Ange-’
‘It’s okay, Hal, I have to go anyway. My phonecard’s almost used up.’
‘Take it easy, Ange.’
‘I shouldn’t be here, Hal. I don’t belong, not really.’
Challis said gently, ‘I know.’
‘It’s not as if I did anything. Conspiracy to murder, God, how did I know he’d try it?’
‘Ange-’
She sighed. ‘Spilt milk, eh?’
‘Spilt milk.’
‘Get on with my life.’
‘That’s the spirit.’
‘I can’t believe I wanted him instead of you.’
Challis drained his glass. He said, ‘Ange, I have to go now. Take it easy, okay? Keep your spirits up.’
‘You’re my lifeline,’ his wife said.
Three
That same night, a woman on Quarterhorse Lane jerked back her curtain and saw that her mailbox was burning. Now the pine tree was alight, streaming sparks into the night. God, was this it, some twisted way of telling her that she’d been tracked down?
She’d been briefed carefully, eighteen months ago. Never draw attention to yourself. Keep your head down. Don’t break the law-not even drink driving or speeding, and especially nothing that will mean you’re ever fingerprinted. Don’t contact family, friends, anyone from the old days. Change all of your old habits and interests. Dress differently. Learn to think differently. You liked collecting china figurines in the old days, right? Went to auctions? Subscribed to magazines? Forget all of that, now. Switch to sewing, cooking, whatever. It’s good to give people a box to put you in-stereotype you, in other words, so that their minds fill in the gaps in your new identity. Above all, don’t go back, not even if you get word that your mum’s dying. Check with us, first. It could be a trap. You make one mistake, or ignore what we’ve been telling you, they’ll find you and they’ll kill you. You’ve got a new ID; it’s pretty foolproof; you’ll do all right. You’ll be lonely, but plenty of people start over again. Just be wary. Watch what you tell people. But you’ll be okay. Plenty of New Zealanders in Australia, so you won’t stand out too much. Meanwhile we’ll do what we can to keep you alive from our end.
That’s what they’d told her. She hadn’t made much of an effort. There hadn’t seemed much point, because the situation had begun to unravel even before the plane that was to take her out of the country had left the ground.
She’d been in the departure lounge of Christchurch airport, eighteen months earlier, seated with the detective assigned to escort her across the water and into a new life, when two men from her old life had waltzed in and sat down nearby. The detective tensed. He knew who they were, all right.
‘Terrific,’ she’d said. ‘They’ve found me already.’
‘Wait here.’
She watched him walk to the desk and show his warrant card. For a while it looked like a no-go, but then the reservations clerk turned sulky at something the cop said and punched a few keys and stared at his screen.
Meanwhile one of the men had spotted her. He nudged the other, whispered in his ear, and now both were staring hard across the dismal green carpet at her. She saw hatred and hunger in their faces. One of them enacted a pantomime of what lay in store for her when they caught her: a bullet to the head, a blade slicing across her windpipe. She hauled her bag onto her lap, got to her feet.
A hand tightened on her shoulder. The cop said urgently, ‘Clara, come with me.’
She pulled away. ‘You must be joking. I’m pissing off.’
‘No. If you leave here they’ll track you and you’ll be dead meat.’
‘They’ve already tracked me down,’ she said. ‘Fat lot of good you people are. Look at them sitting there, large as life.’
‘Coincidence,’ the cop said, forcing her to go with him.
‘Yeah, sure.’
‘I checked. They’re both getting off in Auckland.’
‘But they’ll know I’m going on to Australia,’ she said. ‘They’ll come looking.’
‘Australia’s a big place.’
‘Not big enough.’
‘Look, for all they know, you’re going on to Europe.’
She had glanced back. One of the two men was standing now, watching her. She saw him tap his temple, grin, and flap open a mobile phone with a neat gesture of his wrist. He was flashily dressed, like they all were from that corner of her life: shirt buttoned to the neck, no tie, expensive baggy suit, costly Italian loafers, oiled hair scraped back over his scalp.
‘He’s calling someone,’ she said.
‘Let him.’
‘Where are you taking me?’
‘We’ve got a backup seat reserved for you on another airline. It leaves in fifteen minutes.’
Six-thirty, early evening, a dinner flight, a seat in first class. Clara ate steak and salad, and palmed the knife and the fork. They weren’t much, but at least in first class they were stainless steel, and they’d give her an edge if she needed it, the kind of edge she’d come to rely upon in her short life.