Frantic (29 page)

An explosion almost deafened her. Splinters floated from the ceiling and she realised Angus had fired a shot. Lachlan was screaming as Bee spun and ran. Chris ducked backwards into Sophie and she braced herself, expecting to see Angus come through the doorway, gun in hand, to shoot them both. Instead she became aware of him shouting to Bee – ‘Go! Go!’ – and realised they were more focused on getting away.

Chris peered around the corner. Sophie heard the back door slam and Lachlan’s cries recede. His dummy lay on the floor. She was crying and she started forward but Chris grabbed her arm. ‘Better we set ourselves up here. Once they find the car won’t start they’ll have no choice but to deal with us. I’m going to look for a gun.’

Smoke was visible in the house as she ran to a window. Bee was climbing into the front seat of the Magna, Lachlan squirming and crying in her arms. Angus glanced up at the house and she pulled back momentarily then peered out again to see him slam the door and start the car. It headed off, bouncing over the grass. The three cows scrambled to their feet and ran.

‘The car’s going!’ she screamed at Chris. He rushed to her side, clutching a burned and still smoking fragment of paper. The Magna jolted in a wide circle and picked up speed.

‘You cut the line!’

‘I cut something.’ She sprinted for the back door, Chris so close behind her he kicked her.

The grass on the slope was uneven and Sophie tripped and almost fell. The car swerved and there was a loud report. Angus was shooting at them. She could see him, half out the driver’s window, aiming a black handgun. Judging by the way the car was all over the place, Bee had the wheel from the passenger seat. Ahead of the car was the dam.

There was another shot and Chris fell.

Sophie looked back. He lay still, on his face in the grass. She was torn but could not push aside the thought of her baby son in that car. She put on an extra burst of speed. There was another shot then Bee screamed something. Angus dropped the gun and started to slide back into the vehicle. Sophie saw the brakelights go on but the car didn’t slow. The front wheels slewed sideways but it was too late: the car ploughed over the dam wall with Angus still partway out the window.

It hit with a bang and a splash. Sophie heard herself screaming as if from a distance as she leapt over the top of the wall. The car was already sinking, the water up to the doorhandles. She struggled through the brown water towards the passenger door, crying and screaming Lachlan’s name. The driver’s seat was empty, the door open. Bee was slumped half on the passenger seat, half in the footwell, blood running from a fresh cut on her forehead as well as from the one on the side of her head that Chris had caused. Muddy water lapped across her legs and over the struggling Lachlan. Sophie wrenched at the door but it was locked. Bubbles rose from Lachlan’s mouth. Sophie screamed his name. There were rocks further along the bank but the water grew deeper over him as the car sank in the mud and she balled her fist and punched the window with all her strength.

The glass shattered into hundreds of tiny cubes and pain shot up her arm. She grabbed Lachlan with her good hand and yanked him out the window, clear of the water and the car. He coughed and gasped. She fought her way to the bank, holding him up to her face, brushing glass from his clothes, patting his back to help him bring up any swallowed water. On the dirt she lay him on his side and knelt over him, crooning wordless sounds, her tears dripping onto his soaked clothing, ready to do mouth-to-mouth and delighted to see his colour turn pinker by the moment. She smoothed her hand over his hairless head and he opened his mouth and screamed. She laughed with joy. A baby who could make that much noise was far from death.

Suddenly an arm wrapped around her neck. She was jerked backwards into the water. She tried to elbow her attacker but couldn’t make contact. She thrust her fingers back over her head but caught only hair. From the corner of her eye she saw Lachlan lying on the dirt kicking and wailing. She couldn’t breathe from the pressure on her neck and her head started to buzz with a sound like distant sirens.

From all his kicking, Lachlan started to roll. The water was too close, he was going back in. Energised by her rage, Sophie brought her good fist around in an arc into her attacker’s face. Something crunched under her hand and pain flashed through it, but the grip on her neck loosened a little. She somehow found a foothold in the mud and twisted her body to come face to face with Angus. His nose streamed blood and he was blinking. She rammed her palm upwards into his nose and he cried out, grabbing her and falling backwards, pulling her underwater.

The world was brown and full of bubbles. Angus’s face was a pale blur below her and his left hand clawed at her throat. She found his neck and squeezed, thinking of Lachlan on the bank, trying to get her head up for air and to see where he was.

Angus’s hand was crushing her throat and he straightened his arm, forcing her away, loosening her hold on his neck. She realised his right arm must have been hurt in the crash, as he wasn’t using it, and struggled harder, trying to break free. Black dots appeared before her eyes. She jerked her head backwards and could feel the warmth of the sun on her hair, knew she was so close to the surface and the beautiful wonderful air, but Angus’s hand closed tighter and tighter on her throat. Gathering every ounce of her waning strength she hit with her elbow at his straightened left arm. She felt his elbow give way and she launched herself forward, taking a fresh grip on his neck.

She could feel the tendons in Angus’s neck against her palms. As her mouth opened involuntarily and filled with water she slid her thumbs closer together and found the bony structure of his larynx. She rammed her thumbs sharply inwards, the pain sharp in her injured hands, feeling the larynx crush, feeling the spasm in Angus’s hand on her neck. But he kept his grip. The black dots grew and merged, filling her vision, obliterating the pale shape of his face. She struggled, once feeling air against the side of her face, aware of the growing weakness in her body, the pounding pain in her head and in her hands as she kept squeezing his neck, the wrenching desire to inhale even if it was water she’d take in, until finally Angus’s hold weakened enough that she could jerk herself backwards and out of his grasp, and burst up out of the water.

Lachlan lay red-faced and screaming at the edge of the water. Sucking air in deeply she scrambled to him and lifted him clear, cradling him to her chest as he cried. She stumbled up the dam wall, putting her ear against his back to listen to his lungs, hearing no rasps when he took a breath that would indicate he’d inhaled water. She nestled him against her as she clambered over the wall, feeling she could never get her fill of simply gazing at him. On top of the slope she glanced away for a second to see Chris trying to crawl towards her.

In seconds she was at his side. ‘Chris, it’s okay. Look, he’s here and he’s fine.’

Chris raised his head to see his son. Tears ran down his pale, blood-streaked face. Sophie put Lachlan on the grass next to Chris’s chest and he managed to loop an arm around him. ‘Thank God, thank God.’

‘Where are you shot?’

He half rolled so she could see the wound in his lower left abdomen. ‘I can’t stand up.’

She tore the sleeve from his dry shirt to make a firm pad against it. There were sirens in the distance.

‘Thank God,’ he said again, weeping and cradling Lachlan to him.

Sophie bent low, kissing them both. Lachlan was flailing his beautiful chunky little arms and legs but she felt every inch of them anyway, searching for bruising, watching his face to see if he grimaced over any particular spot. He seemed sore along his left arm but he moved it freely. She smoothed her hands over his head and found only a scratch from the glass, no lumps or cuts. In the nape of his neck she found a line of stubble as if they’d missed that area on the most recent shaving. She kissed him and kissed him.

‘Thank God,’ she echoed Chris, then she heard a bang and dirt sprayed up over them. She looked up and saw Bee on the dam wall, sodden and bloody, a silver gun shaking in her hands.

Oh Jesus, no.

Chris curled himself around Lachlan and Sophie wriggled forward to shield them both. Chris coughed once then raised his voice. ‘Bee, I know why you’re angry. Mum only told me today about what happened, what she did. She was wrong to do it. She knows that now.’

Sophie saw Bee shakily adjust her aim. She saw the fingers contract, the knuckles turn white. She shut her eyes.

There was another bang and something kicked Sophie in the thigh. At first there was no real pain. The blood running down her leg was warm in contrast to the cold dam water in her clothes. She clamped her hand over it but it didn’t stem the flow much. The sirens seemed no closer. Lachlan was gazing up at her.

‘I’m sorry that I didn’t know at the time, Bee,’ Chris went on, squeezing Sophie’s arm. ‘I understand now why you broke it off with me and I’m sorry I wasn’t more sympathetic.’

Bee’s silence was eerie. Sophie watched her from the corner of her eye, hoping to avoid agitating her. The sirens stopped.

Chris lowered his voice. ‘What else should I say?’

In a unsteady voice Sophie called, ‘You’re obviously a very good mother. Lachlan’s in excellent health. Thank you for taking care of him.’ It hurt her to say it when she would have preferred to scream abuse. Lachlan put his tiny hand on her arm. Chris stroked the baby’s little bald head. Her leg was throbbing now.

‘We’ll tell them how well you looked after him,’ Sophie said. ‘We’ll make sure they know that.’

Bee stood there, the gun out in front of her. Sophie heard cars speeding up the slope. ‘Drop the weapon!’ someone shouted.

Bee made another adjustment in her aim.

‘Bee, drop the gun!’

Sophie recognised Ella Marconi’s voice.

‘Drop it now!’

Sophie couldn’t help it, she was drawn to look at Bee. The end of the barrel was a round black spot, aimed directly at her. A shot rang out and Sophie flinched. Bee crumpled in a heap then rolled backwards out of sight down the dam wall.

Saturday 10 May, 3.47 pm

S
ophie lay shivering on the stretcher, her leg throbbing, as one paramedic connected an IV fluid bag to the cannula in her arm and another wrapped Lachlan in a warm dry blanket. The woman handed him back to Sophie with a smile and she tucked him in beside her as best she could with an icepack strapped to her injured hand. He yawned and sucked his thumb.

On another stretcher nearby, Chris was also receiving IV fluids. A bulky dressing was strapped to his abdomen and he propped himself up on his elbow as he handed Ella the burned fragment of paper he’d found in the house and talked through the events. Dennis scribbled in a notebook, flipping page after page. Sophie watched as Ella read the piece of paper and clapped Chris on the shoulder.

Three police officers stood on the top of the dam wall. Sophie knew what they were looking at: Bee lying dead from a gunshot wound to the chest at the water’s edge and Angus floating face-down in the brown water near the half-submerged Magna with its drooping blue ribbon. She thought with grief about Sawyer. She’d told Ella all the details already, and knew she deserved everything the courts would throw at her, and more.

The paramedics wheeled Chris’s stretcher over. ‘Give us a minute?’ he asked them.

Sophie looked at her husband’s face. The blood had been cleaned off. He was pale but his eyes shone with a light she hadn’t seen for weeks. He stroked Lachlan’s arm with his fingertips.

‘Do you remember when he was born?’ he said.

Sophie’s throat thickened. ‘Of course.’

‘Holding him, looking into his face, it was like I’d been given the world again,’ Chris said. ‘All mistakes were gone, and there was nothing to regret, because we were at the start of a new life.’

Tears welled in Sophie’s eyes.

‘That’s how I feel now,’ he said, and leaned over and kissed her.

She clutched at his arm. ‘Chris.’

He kissed her again, and looked into her eyes. ‘What?’

But she couldn’t do it. To say the words, to release the secret that she’d slept with another man – and not just any man but the one who’d shot him and taken their son – would steal that light from his eyes forever. This was a pain she would have to learn to live with. Maybe Chris was right, some things could not be helped by talking.

‘What?’ he said again.

She said, ‘I love you.’

Sunday 11 May, 2.10 am

H
ome at last, Ella opened the window and leaned on the sill. The night was chilly, the sound of traffic on Victoria Road carrying clearly on the cold air, and the cloudless sky was bright with the city’s glow. She yawned and rested her shoulder against the frame and watched the red and green lights of some high plane cross the sky, heading north.

The case was over. Tonight Lachlan was sleeping in a cot in Sophie’s hospital room, and Ella imagined the paramedic pulling the cot right up by the bed and keeping the light on to watch her son. She was having surgery on her leg tomorrow. In another room, down the hall perhaps, Chris was sleeping off the anaesthetic from the operation to remove the bullet from his abdomen.

Bee and Angus – their bodies, anyway – were in Gosford Hospital’s morgue, awaiting the van that would move them to Glebe in the morning. Nobody would ever know now if that first aborted baby was Angus’s, though Chris was certain. Ella thought about the twisted adoptive sibling relationship, losing a baby in their teens and it perhaps charting the course of their lives, a strange little family trying hard to have children and losing so many that they turned both desperate and vengeful.

Sawyer was already in Glebe. She wondered what the post mortem would show as his cause of death, and thought about the case that homicide detectives would build against Sophie. If Sophie got a good lawyer who argued some kind of temporary insanity due to her son being missing, Ella thought she probably had a reasonable chance of avoiding a long sentence, even though she’d confessed every little detail in the statement she’d made at the hospital.

The fragment of paper that Chris had saved had turned out to be part of a roster. The station name was gone but you could see the surnames Wilson and Battye, and Battye was circled, with the word ‘
Civic
’ and the date ‘
5 May
’ scribbled next to it. Between that and the bag of money and the foreign bank records showing large deposits found in Angus’s car, Strike Force Gold would be wetting themselves. Ella wished she could be involved with that case rather than going back to the suburbs, but couldn’t see herself getting the call, especially with the marks she felt she had against her name now. Poor Edman Hughes was dead; she’d more or less allowed Roth to be murdered; and they’d been lucky to solve this case, stumbling across Chris and Sophie’s trail rather than working it out for themselves. Not to mention the investigation into her shooting of Bee.

The investigators were on their way back to Sydney tonight with her gun and the transcripts of the initial interviews with her, Dennis, and every other cop that arrived on scene, whether they’d witnessed the shooting or not. They’d all had blood taken for drug and alcohol tests, and there would be more interviews to come, and a full-blown investigation, and at some point in the future – maybe not for months – she would be told whether her actions had been justified.

Whatever the official verdict, she knew she’d done the right thing. She’d been over and over it in her mind, reliving the rush up the hill in the car, seeing Bee standing on the top of the dam wall with a handgun trained on something in the grass, and how the closer she’d got the clearer she could see Sophie and Chris huddled together. She saw blood on them, saw they were moving, and that was all. She hadn’t even known then whether they had baby Lachlan. Dennis told her later she’d leapt from the car, hadn’t even put it into neutral, and it had stalled with him still fumbling with his seatbelt while she’d gone racing across the grass. She didn’t remember getting her Glock out, only seeing Bee at the end of the barrel, and her own voice shouting at her, so loud. ‘Drop the weapon! Drop it now!’ Bee hadn’t even glanced her way. It gave Ella a shiver to think of the way the woman had kept her focus on the Phillipses. There they’d been, the sun shining on them all, and Ella saw,
saw
, the movement of Bee’s hand on the gun, the tightening of the tendons and muscles, and tightened her own, heard the bang, felt the recoil, and Bee had fallen. Ella ran again, first to see Bee motionless at the edge of the water, then to Sophie and Chris, where she’d looked down to see little Lachlan cradled between them. Sophie and Chris had been laughing, hugging, crying, and then Chris handed Lachlan up to her. She’d taken him in her arms like he was the Holy Grail, the water in his clothes soaking through to her skin, and he sighed and lurched and his head came to rest against hers. He was alive, he was fine. They’d done it. It gave her goosebumps now to think about it, and she clung to the sill with tears in her eyes.

This.

This was plenty.