The Only Secret Left to Keep

by Katherine Hayton

  He pulled Jessie’s head down toward one stocking-cladded knee, busting his nose open so that blood sprayed in a gruesome crimson cloud. Sam mimicked pushing up sleeves, then crouched lower into a fighter’s stance.

  “Come on, then,” he said, ducking his face lower to make sure he caught Jessie’s eye. Matthew stepped forward beside Sam, forming the same gesture but feeling like a child copying his dad.

  Then George rushed up behind them, having circled back unnoticed. He had half a cinder block in his hand, broken lengthwise in some previous battle or game.

  Sam turned toward the new threat just as George whacked down the concrete block with his full body weight behind it. The edge crunched into the side of Sam’s head and caught the side of his jaw.

  Sam dropped like a ragdoll, contemptuously discarded by its owner.

  George stared with horrified fascination until Jessie smacked him on the shoulder to draw his attention, and then the two of them turned and sprinted away. Matthew knelt beside his friend, his mentor, until a wave of nausea had him turning away to vomit.

  When he twisted back, relief flooded through his body. Sam was pushing himself up from the hard ground with his arms, a trickle of blood flowing down the side of his face. Matthew held out a hand to help him, then Sam’s eyes rolled back in his head, and he slumped down again.

  Matthew reached out a shaking hand, pressing it to Sam’s neck. He kept it there while the evening sky turned dark, waiting for what seemed like hours—never feeling the thump of a pulse.

  “What did you do?” Ngaire asked when Matthew had fallen silent for so many minutes that he needed prompting to start again. “What happened next?”

  “I got the car home so that Dad wouldn’t be angry,” Matthew said. He swiped angrily at a tear that trailed down the side of his face. “I was scared that if he saw it was missing, I’d get another hiding on top of the beating I already had.”

  Ngaire grimaced and ducked her head down, trying too late to hide it. The amount of effort that the team had expended since the grisly discovery on the hills, all sorted in seconds from the secrets hidden away in Matthew’s memory.

  Instead of feeling vindicated or pleased, Ngaire just felt tiredness pulling at her bones. A half-hearted confession against two teenage boys who couldn’t be cross-examined? The case might rest, but it wouldn’t be resolved.

  As the silence stretched out again, DSS Harmond snipped it short. “But Matthew, Sam Andie wasn’t found in a warehouse. His body was dug up in the Cashmere Hills. How did it get from one place to the other?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Harmond exchanged a glance with Ngaire who took the baton she’d been passed.

  “Matthew, you said that you couldn’t explain what happened on the night that George and Jessie died without telling what happened to Sam Andie.” She waited for a beat. “Can you tell us about that day now?”

  “I think they’d moved the body,” Matthew said, answering the earlier question as though Ngaire hadn’t spoken at all. “They must have, mustn’t they?”

  He glanced across the table, and when Ngaire nodded he mimicked her gesture. “Yeah, they must have.”

  “So you didn’t know that Sam had been moved?”

  Matthew shook his head. “Not until—” He broke off to clear his throat, growing thick with mucus. “Not until I went back there and saw he was gone. I guess they were covering their tracks.”

  “Did you ask them where they’d taken him?”

  “No. I never got the chance.”

  After another gap of silence, Ngaire tapped on the table to draw Matthew’s attention back. “Matthew, did it ever occur to you to call an ambulance?”

  A long, slow shake of the head. The despair on the man’s face made Ngaire’s compassion flare up until it became overwhelming. She stretched a hand across the table to him but his lip curled, and he snatched his away.

  “It was evident that Sam was dead. An ambulance wouldn’t do any good.”

  “But he was your friend, Matthew. How could you leave his body in that warehouse? Laying out in the open, like trash?”

  The shades came down across his face again, shop window closed, no emotional response. “I needed to get the car back home. If I called the ambulance, it would have turned into a big saga. Better to pretend that it never happened at all.”

  “But you couldn’t pretend that, could you?” Harmond said, her voice so soft Ngaire had to look to reassure herself it came from the same woman. “That’s why you went back.”

  Matthew wiped his runny nose with the back of his sleeve, reverting to a child’s gesture. “I wanted to make sure that someone had found him,” he said. “I watched the news for signs of him every time it came on. I couldn’t leave him out there forever.”

  “When you went to check, you bumped into George and Jessie again?” Ngaire asked.

  With a curl of his lip, Matthew said, “Yes. They were there. I think they may have gone back the day before to move him because there was no trace of Sam in the car.”

  “Their parent’s car, or did one of the boys have his own?”

  “It was Jessie’s mom’s car.” Matthew gave a quick, ruthless grin. “He said that automatically when people asked. I don’t think he understood how much that told us.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Matthew ducked his head down, so his fringe formed a shield to hide his eyes. “His dad was unemployed. When he said his mom’s car instead of his parents, it showed everyone exactly who had the pants in that family.”

  Ngaire shifted in her seat, uncomfortable. What he said echoed the power play between her own parents, growing up.

  “They were looking around the floor, inside and outside the entrance where we’d been standing. George had an old plastic Coke bottle full of soap and water while Jessie had a scrubbing brush.” Matthew tilted his head back and pushed his fringe back from his forehead with elegant fingers. “I could see the spots where they’d scrubbed. Some of it was my blood, though they wouldn’t have known that.”

  Another lengthy silence followed. Where the words had gushed forth at first, now they were nearing the apex of the events, they’d dried to a faltering trickle.

  “Who was there?” Ngaire tried. She wanted to ask about Bob and Shannon but couldn’t afford to place words into his mouth.

  “George Kenton and Jessie Collingwood,” Matthew answered before drifting off into another dream. DSS Harmon slammed her hand, palm down on the table and he jumped, then rubbed at his temples.

  “Do you need a doctor?” Ngaire asked. “We can postpone the remainder of the interview if you’re in pain.”

  She judged from the quick poke in her thigh that Harmond wasn’t in agreement. Neither was Matthew—he shook his head.

  “I’d rather get this over with and go home,” he said. “Emilia will be getting worried.”

  Matthew pulled his hand back down from his face and stared at the back of it as though it were a foreign species. “Did you hear that campaign they had a few years back?” He looked up to see Ngaire and Harmond staring blankly back at him. “They said It gets better.”

  Ngaire nodded as the memory slotted into place. “Sure, for LGBT teens.”

  “It gets better,” Matthew repeated with bitterness oozing from every pore. “What a crock that was. Nothing ever changes, nothing ever will.”

  Harmond frowned and looked from Ngaire to Matthew, puzzled. She bit the corner of her lip and then pulled the interview back onto the rails. “Just walk us step-by-step through the events of that day. You said that George and Jessie were scrubbing the bloodstains off the concrete floor.”

  “That’s what they were finishing up doing when I arrived,” Matthew agreed. “I don’t know how long they’d been there. The piece of cinder block that George had used on Sam was nowhere I could see.”

  Ngaire wondered if that had been recovered with Sam’s body, or even if it was still in a dirt hole on the side of the hill. Dr. Gangarry’s voice
whispered in her ear: it’ll be a bitch to sort out the evidence from the detritus. Not that it would matter. This many years down the track they wouldn’t be able to DNA-type the blood let alone recover fingerprints. If there’d been any, to begin with. A long shot, given the porous nature of cement.

  “I wasn’t sure they’d seen me when I first walked in. The two of them were huddled on the floor, George down on his knees scrubbing. I got such a shock when I first saw them that I hurried over to the center lift well and hid around the corner. It took me a while to work out what they were doing when I looked back.”

  The DSS leaned forward, eyes alight with interest. “What were they doing?”

  “Just moving random shit around.” Matthew shrugged. “They were swapping out the blocks and dirt that had been on top of the piles along the wall and shoving them further down. I guessed they weren’t certain what had blood or fingerprints on or not, so were moving everything that had been on the surface, out of the way.”

  “Wouldn’t that put more fingerprints back on them?”

  Matthew smiled at Harmond. “They were wearing driving gloves in the middle of summer. I guessed it wasn’t because they were cold.” He leaned to one side suddenly, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down with urgent swallowing. When his apparent bout of sickness passed, he straightened up and continued.

  “I leaned back against the wall to wait it out. I figured if I walked past George and Jessie again they had a good chance of spotting me, whereas if I sat back, they’d eventually finish and bugger off.”

  Matthew wiped his lip with the edge of his forefinger, as though ridding himself of the taste of something nasty.

  “Then Shannon walked in. She looked surprised as hell to see anybody there and tried to run back out. George and Jessie saw her, though.” He paused, once again wiping his lip with the side of his finger. “I don’t know what it was about her that signaled she was linked with Sam.”

  Matthew looked up, his eyes glistening with unshed tears and the tendons on his neck tensed, popping out in stark relief against the pale flesh. “They knew, though, I could tell that at once. They chased her down like she was a dog, slamming into the back of her and dropping her to the ground. Her head hit the concrete with a wet smash.”

  Once again, Matthew’s Adam’s apple bobbed up and down, up and down. He held a shaking hand up to his head like a shield against a bright sun.

  “I thought they’d killed her, too, with that sound. I thought her head must have smashed into pieces on the ground. I couldn’t—”

  Matthew started rocking back and forth, wrapping his arms around his chest and digging each tensed fingertip into the opposite upper arm. As Ngaire watched, the skin turned bright crimson from the force, the short nails punching into his skin.

  “I couldn’t let them get away with it. Not again.” Matthew’s whole body started shaking while he kept rocking, back and forth. Back and forth.

  “I ran across to the piles of rubbish and grabbed up the first thing my hands found. It was a lid to an old drum, I think. A metal plate flaking with rust. I ran up to them and slammed it first into Jessie’s head, then into George’s. Before Jessie could recover, I smashed it into his face again. It was still bruised and swollen from the other night…”

  Matthew suddenly unlocked his arms and leaned to the side, throwing up with one hand braced against the table and the other clinging to the back of his chair. He spat afterward and turned back with a sweating sickly look on his face, then immediately turned to throw up again.

  “We’ll get you the doctor,” Ngaire said, but the DSS put a restraining hand on her arm.

  “Matthew? What did you do?”

  “I kept hitting them until I couldn’t hold the metal anymore. George and Jessie were both down on the ground by then, so I kicked them in the guts a few times to keep them there.”

  “Ma’am, I really think we should call a doctor,” Ngaire said, the sweet and sour tang of vomit rising into the air. “He’s not well.”

  Harmond didn’t even turn to look at her. She’d half-risen over the table, palms flat down, supporting her upper body to lean closer and closer to Matthew. He flinched back, his forehead slick with sweat, a line of spit strung from the edge of his lip down to the back of his hand.

  “Tell me what you did.”

  “I didn’t kill them,” Matthew cried out. The force of the call used up the last of his energy, and he slumped forward onto the table, as dirty and disheveled as a used cleaning rag.

  “I didn’t kill them,” he repeated as he cried into the table. “But I did tell Shannon what they’d done.”

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  As DSS Harmond stepped forward to knock on Mrs. Collingwood’s front door, she turned to Ngaire. “No surprises in there, okay? We get in, tell her that no new charges are being laid with regards to her son, and then ask about the car.”

  Ngaire nodded and inclined her head. Although the team had sent people back to Sam Andie’s burial site in search of any new evidence, the chance of finding anything there would be slim. Earlier on, at the station, the general consensus was that if the car were gone there would be no DNA to ever tie George or Jessie to the case.

  A car still owned by the same driver after thirty-six years? No one was holding out any hope. If it was tucked away in her garage—definitely not the new car in her drive or registered by the NZ Transport Agency—then they had a small shot. Without it, there would never be any actual closure. The state can’t prosecute dead men and the word of a lying eye-witness wouldn’t carry much weight even if they could. A coroner would have no choice but to declare an open verdict.

  “Mrs. Collingwood? My colleague and I would like to update you on what’s happening with regards to Jessie’s case.”

  For a moment, the sour expression on Elana’s face grew so potent that Ngaire thought the door would be slammed in their faces. After a short struggle, though, the woman opened it wider and waved them through. She settled for a protest by the act of sighing loudly.

  “Are you arresting that old man?” Mrs. Collingwood asked as she followed them into the lounge. “That would just top this whole shambles off nicely.”

  “We’re not,” Ngaire answered and tilted her head to one side. “You didn’t believe that Mr. Rickards hurt your boy?”

  She framed the spontaneous query as a question but it was closer to a statement. The woman’s demeanor showed a softening at the mention of the man.

  Elana Collingwood shook her head. “No. I never believed it for a second. Now, what?” She looked from Ngaire to Harmond and back again, then frowned and repeated, “What happens now?”

  Ngaire shrugged and turned her mouth down at the corners. “Nothing happens now, Mrs. Collingwood. We now believe that we successfully prosecuted the correct person, and Ms. Rickards has already served her sentence for that. Everything just goes back as it was.”

  “Why are you here then?” Elana asked. “Why couldn’t you just phone me to tell me that news? Last time, you lot didn’t even bother to do that. I found out they were holding someone for Jessie’s murder on the news.”

  Ngaire opened her mouth to protest that it wasn’t true, then closed it again. Obviously, Elana had been in such a state of grief that she wasn’t able to process the news when the police told her. Telling her it happened differently now, wouldn’t change the false memories formed over decades.

  “There were a few loose ends brought up during the new investigation,” DSS Harmond said. She gave a small laugh. “This is going to sound silly but do you still happen to own the same vehicle that you did back in 1981?”

  Mrs. Collingwood frowned and gave a quick, slitted glance at the two of them. “Of course, I don’t,” she said. “That thing was on its last legs back then. Only Alan could keep that rackety engine going, and in the end, it bested even him.” She sniffed and turned away.

  “Did you sell it to a new owner?” Ngaire asked. If she had, the paperwork hadn’t been followed up on pr
operly. Either that or like everything connected to Sam Andie’s case, the files hadn’t made the transition over to computers with ease.

  “We traded it in for a new one,” Mrs. Collingwood said, then barked with laughter, the sound close to that of an angry seal. “I say new but it was just new to us. That was back in the day before the foreign imports. Nobody afforded anything but second-hand back then, least not around here.”

  “So, it went back to a dealer?” Harmond clarified. When Mrs. Collingwood nodded, Ngaire felt the last shred of hope die within her.

  It doesn’t matter. As long as you found out the truth of what happened, the rest is up to someone else.

  A nice thought but one that rankled with her all the same. Few officers liked the time after they closed the case and passed evidence over to the crown prosecutors. That feeling was made worse by knowing that they wouldn’t even consider it before passing it on.

  Let it go. You did the best you could do. Why did it seem lately that Ngaire’s best wasn’t ever quite good enough?

  They left the house, barely clearing the jamb before the door came slamming closed after them. Ngaire sniffed the air and turned toward the hillside. The scent of summer was in the air, grass slowly roasting under the relentless sunshine. All the smoke of the past week was dissipating, leaving behind an underlying tang of char but otherwise, completely gone.

  “I suppose it was too much to hope for,” Harmond said, peering in through the side windows of the car currently parked in the driveway.

  Ngaire bent down to look inside, too, despite the likelihood the designer of the vehicle wasn’t even born back in eighty-one.

  A puddle around the car spoke of a recent cleaning. The silver window frames gleamed and twinkled in the intense sun. No children’s seats, no rubbish, no fancy seat covers made to cushion numb behinds.

  In the backseat was a travel rug, one end trailing down toward the floor. Everything else looked standard issue. Ngaire couldn’t imagine the tight-lipped Mrs. Collingwood ever expending money on something frivolous to decorate her car. Not even a dangling air-freshener.