The Wave at Hanging Rock: A Psychological Mystery and Suspense Thriller (36 page)

Now that Dave had sat down, their heads were at the same level. Natalie blinked several times before answering. The only response which came to her was a professional one.
 

“It’s not an uncommon response,” she said, her voice was flat, as if she’d switched off from anything emotional. “Fantasies like that. Everyone has an inner world that’s kept private, where we explore options that we’d never actually consider doing for real.”

Dave nodded, then when she didn’t continue, he answered.

“There is no chance with Elaine. The man who wrecked her life is long gone. But the man who killed your husband isn’t. He’s all alone on one of our helicopters next week.” Suddenly Dave stopped and bit hard on his knuckle. He screwed his eyes tight shut for a second.

“I’ve been skirting around the subject so I’ll just come out and say it. I think we have no choice. I think we have… The
moral right
to take this matter into our own hands. The moral necessity. I think we should take him out Natalie.”

They stared at each other for a long while until Dave went on, now his voice was much quieter. “And I know how we’re going to do it.”

Natalie, already shrunken into herself, felt her body shrivel even further. She felt the blood drop from her head and her vision began to close in, she wondered if she was going to faint, and she didn’t care, she wanted to. Anything but this. Anything but being here in this room listening to this. But then her body began to recover. She could feel her heart hammering in her chest but her eyes slowly regained everything around her, Dave’s pokey little office, the distant sounds of the party below. When she finally felt able to open her mouth she felt cornered. There was no way out of this, apart from this one horrible chink of light.

“How?” she said.
 

Once he’d told her she had just one question.
 

“What about Elaine? She already suspects something. How are we going to explain us being together?”

“I thought that too. But I think it helps us. You understand we cannot get caught doing this. We cannot ever tell anyone. So this becomes our alibi. If the police seem in any way suspicious when we explain it to them, I’ll tell them that we were having an affair. It’ll explain it if we look strange at all. It’ll make us look innocent.”

Natalie stared at him with a look half way between amazement and disgust.
 

“You’d risk your marriage on top of everything else.”

“I already did that, a long time ago.” He gave her a look she didn’t understand and she turned away.

“Natalie, I don’t want to do this, but we have no choice. We just have to do it in a way that we can never get caught.”

She stared at him, angry now, but then she looked away and dropped her head into her hands.

“What about Jesse? Have you been in touch with him? Does he know about this?”

Dave paused. “He’s phoned. He’s phoned several times. He knows about the flight, I think he guessed from something he read in a gossip magazine. He’s desperate to help. But I haven’t told him.”

“Oh Jesus Dave. Is there really no other way?”

When his eyes met hers there was a pleading in them. He shook his head.

“There isn’t.”

forty-five

THE FLIGHT JOHN Buckingham had booked with the firm was from his home in the west of London direct to Ireland. It was the second such flight he was taking, and like the first it was to visit his girlfriend Sienna, who was in the final weeks of shooting a movie over there. She was playing the romantic interest lead in an IRA thriller.
 

It hadn’t been easy for the director to find a location which allowed for the beautiful wide open shots of the 1980s landscape minus the many wind turbines which had popped up since then, and which they were allowed to blow up as comprehensively as the script demanded. The spot they chose also had to house the nearly one hundred people who were working on the film in decent accommodation. Sienna’s Hollywood-based co-star demanded a house of his own. In the end they found somewhere perfect, and the only caveat was that it was a three-hour drive, down twisty roads, from Dublin International airport. It was for this reason that John had the helicopter booked. Or more accurately, that his PA - a woman called Carol - had booked it for him. Dave knew all this from her rather chatty email, and he also concluded that over the years John’s reason for using the firm’s helicopters had shifted from primarily a means of monitoring them, to a habit born of convenience. If you can afford to travel by helicopter, the speed, comfort and point-to-point nature of it really is very handy. At least that was what he was counting on.

He checked the logs. During John’s first trip, nearly three weeks previously, the chopper had flown from London to the film set, picked up the actress and then the pair had spent two days flying around Ireland, first visiting the Ring of Kerry for one night, and then heading north for a second night on an island in Stangford Lough. Damien had been the pilot. Carol’s instructions this time around, which assumed Damien would once again be flying them, were that he should pick up Sienna from the same location but this time head to Dublin, where she (Carol) had reserved a suite at the Hilton Hotel.

Thus Dave’s first task was to tell Damien he wasn’t needed for this trip. He got lucky with the excuse. A late job had come in, a corporate hospitality golf gig that Dave would have had to fly since there were no other pilots available. It was plausible enough that Dave preferred to fly the Ireland trip himself, and Damien didn’t sound surprised when he was told of the change in plans. The only thing that did surprise him was when Dave also mentioned that he would take the Eurocopter, but it wasn’t a big surprise. The Eurocopter was the largest helicopter they operated, capable of taking seven guests, and too big really for the two clients who were booked to use it. But it was also the newest, and Dave mentioned to Damien, as casually as he could, that he just wanted to spend a bit of time getting to know her. Dave didn’t mention that Natalie would be coming with him. It would have sounded odd to do so.
 

Actually Dave knew the chopper very well, he’d spent enough time researching it before signing the payment schedule to add it to his fleet. And he knew it was the only chopper they operated which would allow them to carry out his plan. What made the Eurocopter unusual was its interior layout. The two seats up front faced forwards, for the pilot and co-pilot. The paying passengers travelled in a separate rear cabin where six white leather seats - armchairs really - were arranged facing each other around a low table. Below its beautiful cherrywood top were two glass-fronted cabinets, one was a small keep-warm oven, the other an ice box. When clients booked the Eurocopter they could choose from a range of light meals to eat onboard, each prepared by a ground-based team of Michelin-starred chefs and designed to stay at their best for a flight of up to three hours. There were no cabin crew, the passengers had to serve themselves, but if this was a hardship, there was complimentary champagne to sooth ruffled VIP feathers.
 

Dave advised Carol of the upgrade to the aircraft by email, noting that it was complimentary, and attaching the menu and drinks list, along with a request that she let him know ASAP so they could ensure his order was ready for his flight. Then Dave had waited nervously for four hours until she replied, during which time he had begun to fret that the man might suffer from airsickness, or eat at unusual hours, or even that there had been something in his email which somehow raised her suspicions. Dave’s heart beat faster when her reply had pinged into his inbox. He needn’t have worried. She was brief but enthusiastic:
 

“That’s no problem! John loves an upgrade! Please no food, but Champagne would be perfect!”

She even added a smiley face after her name.

That done, Dave moved onto the next stage of the plan. It was harder than he imagined to force the needle of the hypodermic through the bottle’s cork. He had to take it out to his workshop, place the bottle in a vice (swaddled in a towel so as not to mark the label), then load the syringe into his table-mounted drill. He broke two bottles and three needles before he tried heating the needle with a blowtorch. Once it was red hot it burnt its way through the foil and cork. It left a mark but it was so small it was hard to find even if you looked for it.
 

It wasn’t easy either to know what to inject into it. He knew a little about pain killers from living with Elaine for so long, and he had a medical cabinet full of options. Natalie had some expertise too, but neither of them knew how to adapt their knowledge to be certain of how to knock a man unconscious, nor how well their concoction would be disguised in a glass of Moet and Chandon. This was complicated since they didn’t know how much their victim would drink, nor how quickly. They knew enough not to risk using the internet to check, and they realised that a certain degree of caution was necessary. It would make the final job more difficult, and a great deal more unpleasant, but ultimately less risky.
 

With the decision made, these preparations were carried out with a light-headed sense of unreality. The relief that there was a route out of the nightmare overwhelmed any opportunity to consider that the plan was insane. A sense of paranoia took over. They put nothing down in writing, no texts, no emails. They used the telephone only to arrange where to meet. They didn’t talk again with Jesse. Dave insisted it was better he knew nothing about it. The short timescale, the subterfuge and the preparations conspired to make them feel better already, at least in the daytime. Only during the nights did real doubts creep in, and each morning they both felt the need to make contact, to reassure each other they were doing the right thing.
 

But now they were nervous. Obviously nervous. Sitting in silence, feeling sick nervous. They were in the air, en-route from Bristol to West London. The journey only took forty minutes and Natalie counted the minutes down. In front of her a GPS screen showed their location, the time to destination ticking down far too quickly. Then the one dot on the screen was joined by a second, the small hotel, near John Buckingham’s house, where it was possible to land the Eurocopter. They were five minutes away and she could stand Dave’s silence no more.
 

“I can’t believe we’re going to do this.” She said, only to have something to say.
 

He looked across at her then reached over and put a hand on her arm.
 

“We’ve been though it Natalie. We’ve covered every angle.”

“But what if he recognises us? Here’s this guy that’s been watching our every move for all these years. Isn’t he going to be suspicious that we both turn up driving his helicopter?”

“He probably won’t even see who we are. From what Damien said he spends every flight with his head down going through papers.”

“But what if he doesn’t this time?”

“We just have to act totally natural. There’s no reason why I wouldn’t fly the helicopter, it’s my business, I’m a pilot. And you’re a shareholder, come to check out the firm’s new toy. And this flight has been booked for weeks, long before you were sent Jim’s wallet.”

“But what if he knows we’ve been sniffing around Llanwindus? Showing people Jim’s picture?”

“He doesn’t.”

“He might though.”

“But he probably doesn’t. That’s why we’re hitting him now. Before he gets to know. We have to do this Natalie. We’ve been through it.”

“I know,” She sounded small and sad.

“Breathe. Take ten deep breaths,” Dave said. “We’ve just got to get through this. Get him in the back and drinking and it’ll soon be over. And remember. Remember what this man has done to you. What he’s taken from you. And what he could still do if we don’t do this.”

She closed her eyes and gave a couple of quick breaths. Then she took some deeper ones. She felt herself calming down, then she looked across at him and nodded.
 

“This is the only way we get our lives back intact. This is the right thing to do.”

The screen in front of Natalie showed them as one minute away, and Dave began to slow the big machine down. They were over a golf course and ahead of them the hotel slipped into view, its garden held a large ornamental pond and the painted H of a tarmac helipad.
 

“We’re here.”

They landed at two forty five, fifteen minutes earlier than arranged but as Dave was dialling Carol’s number to let her know they were there Natalie pointed out of the cockpit towards the Range Rover, its windows tinted on the sides, but clear through the windscreen. It came to a halt a few car lengths away, and a lady in the passenger seat waved at them through the windscreen. Dave put his phone down.
 

“This is it Natalie. Just stay calm. Stay with me.”

He unbuckled his straps and pushed open the door, suddenly the low hum of the engine, muffled by soundproofing, was replaced by a roar of noise. Dave climbed the two steps down to the ground and walked over to the car, one arm held high above his head to protect from the downdraft. Natalie stayed where she was. She watched the car as the driver’s door opened and John Buckingham stepped out.
 

She recognised him from photographs on the internet, but was surprised at his size in real life. He wore a blue suit that looked expensive, but it did little to hide the powerful frame underneath. He was tanned and his blond hair was pulled back from his head in a neat ponytail. Even so he was strikingly handsome. The PA got out of the other side and they were walking past each other, she presumably to drive the car away, he to join Dave who had closed most of the gap from the chopper to the car. She watched the two men shake hands, and then lean in close to each other, presumably to try and be heard above the noise. She could see Dave moving to pick up John Buckingham’s small valise but the younger man waved him away. Instead Dave moved his arms to show him the way towards the helicopter.