He gave a bitter snarl—all these people made him want to vomit.
“Please,” she moaned, “untie me.”
He looked for a moment at this poor girl, her face still covered with dried sperm, then at the two handcuffed numbskulls. The gilded youth of Auckland . . .
It was four-thirty by his watch. Osborne took out his cell phone and dialed Nick Melrose’s number.
He was asleep, but Osborne insisted so much that he finally woke up. It was a brutal awakening.
“I’ve found what I was looking for,” Osborne said. “Hotel Empire, Nelson Street, off K Road. Room 122. I’ll wait for you here.”
“What?” Melrose grunted at the other end of the line.
“I advise you to be quick about it.”
He hung up, while the others watched him aghast.
“But . . . ” murmured Melanie. “You promised.”
“Shut up,” he said, putting the gag back on her.
Leaving her spread-eagled on the table, Osborne quit the premises.
His own utu.
12.
Amelia was bent over the legless corpse. All the organs were exposed and there was a kind of chemical atmosphere in the basement. As pale as her white coat, she had said nothing, but the memory of the attack had left traces on her face. With Osborne, happiness was short-lived. Here he was now, coming back, grim-faced.
“Found anything?” he said finding her in her lair.
“On the shelf,” she replied.
Her eyes too had lost their luster. Osborne picked up the envelope from the shelf. Inside was her interim report.
Amelia had analyzed the tissues of Tagaloa’s face, in particular the scars caused by the moko. As he had thought, the incisions were no more than forty-eight hours old. But the tattoos hadn’t been done with ink but in a more traditional manner: with charcoal. Amelia had also found pollen in the tissues. From the pohutukawa, a tree that blossomed in summer on North Island, especially by the sea. But the most surprising element was the tool used for the mokos. It wasn’t a needle that had caused the incisions, or any kind of steel object, but a very sharp chisel, probably made of bone.
An uhi, Osborne thought, the traditional chisel used for tattoos, which in the old days was cut from whale bone—or human bone.
The femurs.
That was why they hadn’t been found in the mass grave in Waikoukou Valley. Nepia and Zinzan Bee had needed them to make uhis and, like the old followers of the cult of Hauhau, tattoo the warriors before battle. All the various pieces of information he had gleaned suddenly coalesced in his weary brain. Nepia was using charcoal from the pohutukawa for his mokos. A tree that grew by the sea.
Hana was with them.
Great Barrier.
The house he had bought her.
The blood was thumping in his veins. It was like a blinding flash through his head.
Amelia, scalpel in hand, had just opened the thoracic cage. Osborne turned to her, ashen-faced. “Are you going to be much longer?”
“At least three or four hours,” she replied without looking up.
“You can’t stay lumbered with this guy,” he said. “We’ll have to get rid of him.”
“Not before I finish the postmortem.”
“It’s too dangerous. I’ve sent Timu and his cronies on a false trail, but they’re going to want to question you in the end.”
“You see to your business, I’ll see to mine,” she retorted. “Let them come. In any case, I’m handing in my resignation as soon as this is all over. But there’s no way I’m giving up. Not now. There may be more clues still to find.”
Osborne cursed: he didn’t like leaving her with the corpse. He didn’t like it at all.
“I know a place to hide him,” she went on, “not far from the house. Until you’re able to get rid of him.”
He nodded, but his eyes had changed.
“Why?” Amelia asked. “Are you going?”
“Yes.”
“Where?”
“Great Barrier. I think they’re there.”
“Who are “they”?
