Half Moon Bay (29 page)

And Nick? How could he make love to her as though she was the only person in the world, all the while knowing he was living a lie?

She couldn’t take it. She jumped to her feet and ran down the stairs. With the phone tucked under her chin, she threw her clothes into her bag.

‘Hello, a taxi please.’ She gave the address. ‘Off to Bankstown, and I have a dog.’

The home phone rang, startling her, but she ignored it, leaving the answering machine to pick it up.

‘Ellie? Are you there?’ The molten dark voice filled the room and her heart raced despite her anger. There was a pause and she sat on her hands to prevent herself reaching for the phone. ‘I’ve finished here, so I should be home in half an hour.’ He hung up and Ellie scrabbled to turn her mobile phone off before it too rang.

She hadn’t felt so alone since that long flight home with Nina. Damn him. She buried her face in her hands. Why was she such a fool?

Ellie walked up her front drive with mixed feelings, her leather bag in her hand, the afternoon sun casting long shadows. She was exhausted from the flight north. Her dog didn’t look in much better shape. For once the view from the cockpit had done nothing to soothe her. She barely remembered to thank Dave as he helped her push the aircraft into its cosy hangar. Now here she was, back in Half Moon Bay with answers she wished she’d never found as the sky turned pink with impending sunset.

Home. Would it still bring her comfort and peace?

She stopped dead in her tracks. The back door was ajar. The immediate rush of adrenalin shook her. She could see curtains wafting in the breeze that filtered in through open windows. Common sense asserted itself. An intruder wasn’t going to air the house. She pushed the door open, hoping its lower hinge didn’t squeak. Shadow charged past her, feet skidding on the polished floor, and launched himself into the lounge room.

‘Hey, big fella! Miss me?’ The laugh that echoed through the house made Ellie run as she followed Shadow down the corridor.

‘Dad? You’re home!’ Ellie found herself caught up in a bear hug that threatened to crack her ribs. ‘When did you get here? Why didn’t you ring?’

‘If you’d answered your phone this afternoon, I’d have told you.’ Tom Wilding put his daughter down on her feet, but still kept hold of her arms. His vivid blue eyes never strayed from her face. Smile lines radiated from his eyes, but his expression was pensive. He looked older, more silver than red in his hair now.

Ellie didn’t have to try hard to smile. ‘I was a bit busy flying at the time.’ She planted another kiss on his cheek, the smell of his old-fashioned aftershave comforting. ‘I’m so glad you’re here. The house was too empty without you. And you’re just in time to help clean up O’Sullivan’s mess.’

He laughed. ‘So I hear. I got your emails and phone messages, but communications aren’t all that good in remote WA yet. And that flash satellite phone is about as useful as a chocolate teapot. I don’t think I ever managed to get to a call in time. Retrieving messages was chewing through my data allowance. Drove me nuts.’

‘You and me both. I got tired of leaving voice messages, but at least I could hear your voice.’

‘And I’m here now. You okay?’ he asked. ‘I’ve heard you’ve had a pretty gruelling week. I’m so sorry about Alex. He was a good man. So were his parents.’ His eyes were serious now.

‘Who’s been telling tales out of school?’ she asked.

‘Nick Lawson.’

She pulled away from him, her voice harsh. ‘That lying coward.’ She almost spat the last word as she dropped onto the couch, trying to erase the picture of Nick asleep on it.

‘Ellie, give him a chance to explain.’

‘There’s nothing else he needs to say to me, ever. He made me care about him and then . . .’ She choked off her words.

‘Made you do anything you didn’t want to?’ Tom sounded surprised. ‘I know he’s a bit arrogant when he needs to be, but I didn’t think you’d let any mere male tell
you
what to do, even an ex-major from an engineering corp.’

Ellie snorted derisively. ‘I knew he was army, but he never bothered to share that piece of history with me. He set me up as part of his investigations and he lied from start to finish. If you knew him that well, you wouldn’t be defending him.’

‘When you ran away after Nina died, that young man kept me sane,’ her father said slowly. Ellie’s head snapped around, surprised to see unshed tears in his eyes as he continued. ‘Whatever the Board of Inquiry found, I know the truth and so does he. I could never call him a friend, if he wasn’t an honourable man.’

The guilt slammed down on her. ‘I’m sorry I ran away.’ Ellie’s voice faltered. ‘I couldn’t face the fact I couldn’t save her. I let her down and I let you down.’

Tom folded his arms around her, rocking her as he’d done since she was a child. ‘You brought her home, Ellie, did everything you could. You have never let me down in your life. I understood why you had to rush off to the ends of the earth. Why you couldn’t bear to sit through all those days of questions. Just like I always understood why I needed to.’ He sighed, his breath a warm caress on the top of her head. ‘I met Nick the first day of that inquiry. He came up, shook my hand and told me who he was. I got the feeling he expected me to slug him there in the foyer of the Defence building. And if I had, I reckon he would have stood there and let me. I guess he was facing his own demons.’ He stopped talking and Ellie knew he’d be able to feel her shaking against him. ‘Come outside.’

They sat side by side on the top step, as they had as a family so many times in the past. It was wide enough to fit three and subconsciously they sat to one side, making room for Nina.

‘Nick was the commanding officer of the combat engineers in Afghanistan that Nina managed to attach herself to. They were heading to Uruzgan Province eventually but were in Kandahar at the time, waiting to ship out. God knows what strings she’d pulled to organise that one.’

Ellie reached out to hold her father’s hand.

‘Nina crossed the fine line between reporting and entrapping. She was so hell-bent on proving that there were drugs being trafficked to Australia that she helped set up a deal, a big one.’

‘No!’ Ellie said, but her mind had already joined the dots. The picture made sense.

‘Yes. And she had an affair with one of the men.’

Ellie gripped his hand tighter and he patted it.

‘No, it wasn’t Nick. His name was Geoff Trader. Wife and two lovely kids back in Sydney.’

‘But that’s crazy. Where’s the proof?’

‘The army’s internal report is inside. Perhaps it’ll be easier for both of us if you read that first, then we can talk.’ He eased away from his daughter, leaving a space that Shadow quickly filled. She stroked the warm, black hide. Too late now to consider how hard it had been for her father to stay home and face the inquiry alone. She hung her head. She’d been so self-absorbed it had simply been easier to run.

‘Here you go. I’ll make us a cup of tea. Peppermint?’

She nodded, and he ruffled her hair, the warmth of his love lingering after he’d gone.

She wrapped her arms around her body against the sudden chill. The papers Tom had left on her lap rustled and she cautiously straightened them out. It was a fax copy with a cover note.

DM would be Dave Miller, Ellie guessed. The ginger-haired man who’d guided her through that day from hell. She rose and walked down onto the front lawn to the edge of the dunes, holding the report against her chest, and stared unseeing out to the horizon. The world had changed colour around her. Shadow followed, sensing the shift in her mood. She didn’t even notice the dog. She knew she needed to read the fax, but part of her was scared of facing the truth, even with her father beside her.

A shadowy image of Nick framed in her mind. Now she knew who it was, she couldn’t understand how she hadn’t recognised him earlier. He’d been there in the hospital in Kandahar in the morning, eyes heavy with fatigue, mouth stern. He’d barely spoken two words to her, but the strength in the clasp of his hand had given her renewed determination. He’d been at the airport as well, heading the detail that protected the two women and the medical team as they boarded the charter jet. There’d been approval and support in his eyes as they locked gazes while the air stair door closed. It added another colour to him, another shade, another complexity.

She walked back to the verandah and curled up in the old squatters chair. With her fingers shaking, she smoothed the pages and started to read.

The language of the report was clinical and cold. A civilian and a soldier, out after curfew and captured by insurgents. In the resulting rescue, both of them had been shot.

There was a clear implication that Nina had been conducting a relationship with Geoff Trader, contrary to Defence Force policy, but nothing was officially stated to that effect. According to the report, the commanding officer had retired from the Defence Force after the incident, though the inquiry found that he had acted in a responsible and timely manner during the rescue attempt. There were question marks over some of the evidence given by him. Did Nicholas Lawson have reason to be economical with the truth?

Ellie assembled the facts in her head. Nina had been investigating a heroin-trafficking operation, so it seemed were Defence. Her sister had had an affair with Geoff, probably because she was pumping him for information. According to the notes attached to the report, Nicholas Lawson had refused to corroborate those accusations at the official inquiry. It spared Geoff’s widow the pain of knowing how her husband really died. Consequently, Nick had left the army. Walked away from something he obviously loved passionately and was also extremely good at.

She found a glimmer of hope in it all.
Maybe, just maybe, he did care about her
, she thought. Perhaps he really had meant the throaty words of the night that spoke of his need, his desire for her.

The faxed report to her dad was dated today. Was that what Nick had meant when he said they needed to talk when he got back?

‘Here.’ Tom shoved the cup of tea into her hand, peppermint sharp in the air.

‘Thanks, Dad.’ She wrapped her hands around the mug against the chill of the afternoon sea breeze. ‘I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you.’ She raised teary eyes to his. ‘I didn’t know . . .’

‘And if O’Sullivan wasn’t such a fool, you might never have known either,’ Tom replied. ‘I watched Nick give evidence in front of the Board, knowing that what he wasn’t saying was counting against him. He fought to keep Nina’s name out of the press not just for Geoff’s widow, but for my sake and yours as well. The official report leaves an awful lot unsaid. That was what he fought for. No slur on either of their names even though they were both responsible adults who took an unacceptable risk. And in taking those risks and involving herself in the drug trade, Nina put a hell of a lot of other people in the firing line. Nick had such composed dignity throughout the whole process. I found out later his father had died from cancer right in the middle of it. How he held himself together, I’ll never know.’

Tom fell silent before easing himself onto the floor next to her chair. ‘He told me how amazing you were. How you turned up and single-handedly organised a medivac. You won a lot of fans that day. Nick’s your biggest one.’

Ellie shook her head in denial. ‘But I didn’t remember meeting him until I saw the photo today. Even now, what I do remember of him is hazy, two brief occasions when we connected. I’m seeing those images of Nick through a distorted memory. The only person I can remember clearly is Dave Miller.’

‘The liaison officer. Good bloke. You know, the doctors told us after Vietnam that the only way most of us would cope would be to bury those memories deep, and they were wrong. I reckon you did the same thing. Parked the memories of that day into some dark recess of your mind and left them there. Maybe it’s time they came to the surface so you can deal with them once and for all.’

‘They’ve been dredged to the top now,’ Ellie said, shaking her head, ‘but I don’t see how Nick knew me long enough to have an opinion.’

‘Your “quiet dignity and amazing resilience”, apparently, to quote him.’

She shook her head again. ‘I did what I had to and in the end it wasn’t enough.’ There was bitterness in her voice and Tom reached out to her.

‘You did everything you could. And no one was ever going to stop Nina from doing just what she pleased. Helping to expand a drug-trafficking ring? Costing someone else their life? They were the hardest things I had to deal with. She even embroiled Ron and Felicity in it, had them poking around to see what they could find out here, and look what happened to Sarah and Mikey! I’m sure she would have turned the whole operation over to the authorities once she had her story. But she couldn’t because she died. I think sorting that out has consumed Nick for the last two years. I’m glad it’s finished now.’

They were both silent, remembering Nina and the many conundrums that had made her who she was.

Tom looked across at his daughter. ‘I met Geoff’s widow. She’s remarried now, another soldier. This one’s with the SAS, based out of Swanbourne. She was great. I don’t know if I was seeking some sort of absolution from her, but I needed to meet her. That’s part of why I drove across the Nullarbor Plain to Perth.’ He cleared his throat. ‘I got your messages yesterday, all of them. Then Nick phoned me and I knew I had to get back here fast. I flew into Sydney on the red-eye special, landed this morning and caught the commuter flight north. When you did your big bolt from Sydney, I insisted Nick fax the report up to me.’

Tom smiled at his daughter. ‘He told me everything that’s been going on. The Bay, the kids, you . . .’ He gazed out to sea again. ‘And I know he cares for you deeply, but thinks he’s ruined it by not being upfront. I reckoned you were too sensible to throw away a chance at love. He’s not so sure.’ Tom shrugged. ‘He spent a couple of weeks down here after the inquiry. Needed to escape. No one else knew he was here, just me and Shadow. We talked a lot. I think he found some peace. I certainly did. Made me reassess the way I’d dealt with Vietnam, losing your mum, raising you two . . .’

They watched in silence as the ocean changed colour with the falling light. As the wind dropped, Tom checked his watch. ‘I need to see Ron and Mavis. Will you be all right here?’

Ellie nodded, not trusting herself to speak.

He patted her shoulder. ‘You’re the only thing that matters in my life and I’d love nothing more than to see you happy.’