There was a strange atmosphere in the workshop. Hana found it hard to repress a shudder at the sight of the finished work.
“Like it?” he asked.
She nodded.
He moved his hand over her buttocks, noting that she was naked under her summer dress. The salt had dried on her skin, and now it was as soft as the candlelight.
“And do you like me?” he said softly.
“Yes.” For a moment, Hana forgot the newly tattooed face. “Yes, of course.”
Her eyes were as green as jade but he didn’t see anything in them.
At last, he turned back toward Zinzan Bee’s tattooed face. All that still remained to be done was to sew up the lips.
5.
The white stripes sped past before his tearless eyes. Osborne had taken the Southern Motorway. His shoulder was painful, but he could still move it. He was driving through the night, chasing away whatever felt too much like remorse, keeping only the anger. A trap: they had set a trap for him. It was a strange, unpleasant sensation. The drawers of his personal morgue were getting crowded: Fitzgerald, Joanne Griffith, Ann Brook, Tagaloa, and who else? He had put his finger into the same mechanism that had caught Fitzgerald in its coils, and the killers had a head start. They had been waiting for him in the alley, and in the old tattooist’s parlor, they had followed him, worse, they had been one step ahead of him, as if they could read his mind.
Leaving the empty motorway, Osborne drove the Chevrolet onto a small coast road. In his headlights, human habitation was becoming scarcer. He soon slowed down, deciphered some road signs, scared a night bird, missed a crossing, consulted the map he’d unfolded on the seat next to him. Te Atatu: it ought to be quite near. He followed the road, a succession of stony bends, and at last came to the house, the only one in the vicinity, partly hidden by kamashis, which looked ghostly white in the moonlight.
Now that the storm was over, the sea could be seen foaming below. It was around midnight and there was no light in the house. Osborne opened the car door and pulled out the body lying on the back seat. It was heavy and already almost cold. With great difficulty, he hoisted it onto his right shoulder, gritted his teeth, and started walking. The noise of the crickets drowned out his footsteps. Reaching the front door, he rang. Twice. At last he heard footsteps approaching the door, timidly.
“Who is it?”
“It’s me. Paul.”
Amelia held back a cry as she opened the door. The man who’d been giving her sleepless night was standing in the doorway of her house in the middle of the night, carrying something over his shoulder. He emerged from the shadows and she saw what it was: a dead body.
He was carrying a dead body.
“Can I come in?”
He was as pale as wax.
“Y—yes,” she stammered, as if in a dream.
His black suit was a write-off, and there was a spreading scarlet stain on his white shirt. His eyes, on the other hand, were shining brightly. For one incredulous moment, Amelia passed her hand over her sleeping face. Then she stepped back to let him in. She was barefoot, dressed in a white bathrobe that she pulled tight around her neck.
“So you’re walking around with corpses now?” she said.
Barely able to support the body anymore, Osborne crossed the living room and tipped it onto the couch. A Maori with a nasty hole in his stomach.
Amelia shuddered in her robe. “Who is he?”
“One of the Tagaloa brothers.”
He seemed to be asleep. Still somewhat stunned by Osborne’s unexpected arrival, Amelia didn’t quite know how to formulate her next question.
“And . . . what are you doing here?”
He indicated the corpse. “You’re a pathologist, aren’t you?”
She looked at him, wide-eyed. “You’re joking, right?”
Osborne was a head taller than her, battered and bruised. “You have a lab in the basement, don’t you?”
“A lab? But I only dissect butterflies and toads there! And anyway—”
He took her hands in his. “Amelia,” he said softly, “listen to me. A man named Sam Tukao was found in Kirk’s mass grave. Unlike the others, he’d been tortured to death. Tukao is the lawyer who signed the deed of sale for an area of land at Karikari Bay where a big resort complex is being built. I know for a fact that he got a substantial backhander for that transaction. One of Melrose’s companies got hold of the land with the consent of Steve O’Brian, the mayor’s father. There used to be Maori villages on that land, which is currently being dynamited. Joanne Griffith was working as an accountant on the project. You and I both know she was murdered. There has to be a reason behind all of this.”
Amelia listened to him in a daze. This conversation, the dead body brought here in the middle of the night: it was totally surreal. And he still hadn’t let go of her hands.
“What about Ann Brook?” she said.
“She hung out with the local jet set, and was especially familiar with the sons of the mayor and the son of Michael Long, the adman who’s organizing O’Brian’s campaign. I nosed around at the Phoenix, the club where most of them used to go, but three guys beat me up on my way back to the hotel, intending to kill me, as you saw. I don’t yet know who they were, but I do have good reason to believe that Ann Brook was Michael Long’s mistress.”
“Where did you get all that information?”
“From Julian Long, his son. I grilled him a bit.”
Amelia grimaced at the sight of the blood on his shirt. “What else?
“Ann Brook’s murder has had a lot of coverage in the media and the police are under pressure to get results. So they unearth three Maoris just out of prison who correspond to the picture they’ve built up of the criminals. But I went to see the mother of the sole survivor of the shoot-out. She didn’t even know his sentence had been reduced, let alone that he was already out.”
Amelia was registering this data as fast as she could. “You mean they weren’t Ann Brook’s killers?”
“I’d be every surprised if they were,” he said, at last relaxing the pressure on her hands. “The guys found in the house may well have been high as a kite and armed to the teeth, but they were also scared stiff.”
