Hana Du Rose Mysteries Boxed Set: Books 1 - 4

by Bowes, K T

  The fingers which clutched the hanky were devoid of rings and Logan glared at the Indian as he sulked and scowled in his corner, aiming glances of disdain towards his partner. Michael’s words in the bathroom came back to him, re-enforcing both men’s lack of caring for those they damaged. Logan’s chest tightened with emotions he couldn’t name, wanting to snatch the girl’s wrist and yank her from the carriage, making promises of safety and comfort he had no way of keeping. His brain turned cartwheels of possibility, running through scenarios which presented themselves and then faded into unreality.

  Miriam standing shocked him and Logan put his hands out as though to defend himself. “It’s our stop,” she said, pressing her handbag closer to her side.

  Logan shook his head. “No!” he hissed, urgency in his face. “Not yet.”

  “It is, tāne. Up!” Miriam demanded, tugging on his jacket sleeve.

  His mouth opened and closed and Miriam’s eyes widened, fearing a medical episode of some sort. She slumped back into the seat next to him and leaned in close. “What is it, son? What’s wrong?”

  “I can’t,” he said, a catch in his voice. “I can’t get up.”

  The doors swished closed and the train picked up momentum. Miriam gaped out at the Westminster sign disappearing as the train plunged back into its tunnel. “We missed our stop,” she said, her voice rising and drawing attention.

  The man next to her flicked his newspaper and turned to speak to her. “Get out at St James’ Park and jump on the next District Line train. You’ll be back at Westminster in about fifteen minutes. No harm done.” He leaned further forward and stared at Logan. “You alright, mate?”

  “Thank you, he’s fine,” Miriam said, staring at Logan and pleading with her eyes for him not to cause a scene. Logan gaped like a fish and watched the emerald eyes opposite turn in his direction. He held his breath as the woman smiled and he felt the New Zealand sunshine wash over him, comfort and warmth and pure essence of rightness. His lips turned upwards in response before she glanced away, the connection broken.

  “Now, Logan!” Miriam insisted, yanking him to his feet. Her tone was the one she used at home which indicated a clout around the ear was imminent and Logan instinctively ducked. It was enough weakness to allow his mother to tug him towards the open door and out onto the platform.

  Before Logan could react, the doors swished closed and the overwhelming source of light gathered speed, gone into the tunnel before he knew it. The sense of loss floored him, accompanied by a grief so strong it drove him to the cold, draughty ground like a felled bull. Logan clung to a pillar in the underground station beneath St James’ Park and vomited on the flagstones.

  The Sting of Matenga

  “I’m so sorry.” The nurse dressed in the St Thomas’ uniform wrung her hands and chewed on her bottom lip. “We rang your hotel, but you’d left.”

  Miriam covered her face with her hands and her shoulders heaved. Silent crying. The worst. Logan put his arm around her but she elbowed him in the ribs. She blamed him and he knew it. A few short minutes earlier and his uncle was awake and asking for them. Now there was a white sheet over his olive face and the monitors were gone, wheeling along the corridor to prolong someone else’s imminent demise. “Sorry, Ma,” he said, his face ashen and his voice a husky whisper.

  The nurse gave him a wry smile and pushed Miriam into the seat next to the bed. “Your son and I will fetch some water for you,” she said. She reached for Logan’s forearm and he shied away, an unnatural blaze in his eyes.

  “Sorry,” he said for the second time. “I don’t like to be touched.”

  Unnerved, the nurse beckoned with a crooked finger. “This way,” she said. “Let’s leave her for a moment and fetch something to drink.”

  Fatigue and hunger gnawed at Logan’s ribs, wishing for once his brother was in charge. Michael’s hangover would have made a miraculous recovery the moment the door closed on him, although Logan neither knew nor cared which of the lucky travelers would receive his sexual prowess while he and Miriam said goodbye to a dead man. The transient nature of the hotel brought easy pickings and Michael feasted well during the fortnight’s stay, bumping uglies with whoever appeared amenable. It looked from the outside like an illness, a mania like Miriam’s but one which satiated itself with orgasm instead of throwing pans and screaming nonsense.

  “Are you ok?” the nurse asked and Logan stared at the kitchenette, a blank look on his face.

  “I was sick,” he said, “at St James’ Park station.” He shook his head to encourage common sense to return, realising the location was irrelevant.

  The nurse raised a hand to pat his bicep and then withdrew it, remembering. She filled a white plastic cup and pushed it towards him.

  “Thanks,” Logan said. “How do I get back to Ma?”

  “It’s for you,” the nurse said. “We’ll take one to her in a minute.”

  Logan drank three full cups, unable to rid the thirst in his heart. After the fourth the nurse confiscated the cup. “Stop now,” she said. “You’ll upset your stomach again.”

  They filled a cup for Miriam and walked back to Rangi’s cubicle. Logan’s stomach roiled in protest at the water, the stress and the awful loss of someone he should’ve held onto harder. Not Rangi; the girl-on-the-train. He punished himself, falling over the damn shoes and not watching where he was going. “What happens now?” he asked the nurse. “I promised to take him home.”

  “There’s processes,” she said, beginning the formal spiel. “There’s no need for autopsy so his body should be released fairly quickly. Where does he need to go?”

  “Aotearoa,” Logan replied and at the confusion on her face, translated. “New Zealand.”

  “Oh,” the nurse said, drawing out the word. “That will take some organising. Do you have insurance?”

  Logan shook his head at the same time as Miriam began to wail, plunging into the darkness of her private hell, where even the medication couldn’t reach her.

  Aotearoa -Home

  Logan stood on the ridge with the urn in his fingers, his uncle’s ashes safely inside. A thousand dollars lighter, the envelope nestled against his bum, prickling through his jeans pocket. The New Zealand sun shone on the back of his head, its early morning glory picking him out on the dusky landscape as the Tasman Sea churned before him in the distance. His bare feet kicked up dust as he placed the urn at the edge of the precipice and took a step back.

  Logan Du Rose straightened his back and bent his knees, placing open hands on the insides of his thighs. The guttural sound broke from between his lips as the ancient Māori words exploded from his breast. His arms raised high in the air as he slapped his thighs, feeling the sting as he broke into the haka of his tribal line. His right foot slammed the earth, raising the dust and causing birds to clatter from the surrounding vegetation in complaint. Holding his arms out to his side as though reaping, Logan pulled them back to his chest, smashing his palms into his pectorals until it hurt. He put his heart and soul into the haka which his ancestors created, performing it alone on a deserted mountain for a man he barely knew.

  “Ara Ngapuhi e!” he cried, his voice deep and carrying.”Hakatanga tanga ki runga hakatangatanga ki raro e!” He got into his rhythm, isolation and embarrassment no longer a bar to his emotions. “Enei nga pu, Enei nga hamanu Tihei nga iti o Ngapuhi e, kohao rau!” he shouted. Her face swam before him and he pushed the grief aside, the loss too great to contemplate as the hated train carried her and her yellow dress away. “He Atua kei runga nana i takaro, ake i nga maioro koko kai! He ka ki te Atua, hei kanapu i te rangi! Neinaha, neinaha pororoa! Neinaha, neinaha pororoa! Ngapuhi e!”

  Logan finished and sank to the ground, only Rangi’s ashes witness to his promise to himself. “I’ll go back,” he hissed, his chest heaving from altitude and exertion. His father’s horse grazed nearby, tack clanking as the gelding picked through the untouched grass. “I’ll make more money and go back. I’ll find her and bring her
home, so help me Atua, I’ll do it.”

  Logan sniffed and wiped his nose with the back of his hand. “Did you like that, Uncle Rangi, our haka just for you?” He collapsed onto his backside and flopped backwards, feeling the stalks through his ripped tee shirt. His mind wandered down the mountain to the buildings below, dilapidated and empty, his parents turning the place into a hotel at a steady pace. At least his father was anyway. Miriam took to her bed after the flight, heavily sedated and making no sense. The family gathered, horrified by Rangi’s cremated ashes in the simple urn, the only thing the fourteen-year-old could afford in a mere twenty-four hours of faking his mother’s signature and dealing with authorities. They wanted his body. They had it. The Du Roses were never satisfied.

  Logan sat up and fumbled with the urn, unscrewing the lid and peering in. Only a tiny amount remained, the rest scattered over a family plot at the urupa, dusting reverently placed photos of the twenty-year-old man who left New Zealand and looked nothing like the corpse in the hospital bed. “Sorry there’s not much of you, Uncle Rangi,” Logan apologised, leaning over the precipice. “They didn’t want me to have even this much, but I told them I promised.” He’d stood his ground in the ensuing fight, impressing the males in the whānau as he found some hidden spark inside himself; dormant before his flight to England. Mana oozed from the fourteen-year-old as he’d faced down his angry relatives, grey eyes flashing with inner authority. He’d won.

  Logan slithered on his stomach and upended the jar. “Welcome home, uncle,” he said as the wind whipped the dust into its folds and scattered it into the dense bush below. “Say hi to Kuia for me, please and save me a good seat at the feast in Hawaiki. Thank you for your mana too, uncle.” He sat up, an old head on young shoulders and clambered to his feet before tossing his final comment into the wind to follow Rangi’s ashes. “Give Kuia a message for me,” he said. “Tell her Logan Du Rose keeps his promises.”

  Olive fingers snatched up the urn and fastened the lid, securing it in the pocket of the saddle blanket. With a final look behind him at the land he’d owned since the age of five, Logan bounded onto the back of the gelding, pushing it into a swift canter and creating tracks in the long grass. At the crest of the mountain he glanced up at the trunk of an ancient kauri tree blocking his route to the bush, its branches creaking and bending in the breeze. He reined in his father’s horse and stared at the names carved high into the trunk. His keen eyes saw his own name next to Michael’s under Alfred Du Rose and he grinned, the new moko tattoo on his shoulder smarting under his shirt. Pushing the gelding into a break neck descent, Logan whooped in satisfaction, speed negating the ache in his heart and the painful vision of his Circle Line girl.

  The tangata whenua shifted beneath the earth, the Du Rose ancestors stirring and readying themselves for the coming storm. Their chosen son slipped and slid down the treacherous slopes of the mountain, a portend of his life’s journey ahead.

  ABOUT HANA

  The Hana Du Rose Mysteries

  Book 2

  K T BOWES

  Acknowledgement

  I dedicate this book to my husband, who inspires all the best traits of

  Logan Du Rose.

  Chapter 1

  The New Zealand sunrise did not disappoint Logan Du Rose. He perched on the edge of the elevated ridge dangling his long legs over the precipice, his angular face pointed out towards the sea. His muscular biceps moved underneath the light summer shirt, causing ripples in the cloth as he fidgeted as usual. Orange and yellow bled into the navy and cobalt of the sky behind him, justifying his decision to make the half hour trek up the mountain on his white mare. She snuffed at sweet blades of grass in the dim light, her coat glistening with sweat from the uphill climb. The man took a handful of the loose soil beneath him, his soil, bequeathed to him by the Māori elder over three decades earlier. It crumbled in his fingers, cascading back to earth as dust. He was high enough above the rugged, green landscape to have turned and faced east, but the man wished to see the effect of the sunrise on the water, casting its glow over the familiar and comforting waves. He never grew tired of the constancy of this place which grounded him in the tangata whenua, his ancestors, the people of the land.

  Logan held the next handful of soil in his long, scarred fingers before tossing it away on the wind, sending with it his hopes and dreams into the scattered blaze of colour. He had scoured the earth for his soul mate - seeking her out on the basis of that one meeting - and failed. After twenty-six years, he relinquished his precious dream to the breeze and watched the shards of his heart drift away, fragmented and broken. Then he turned sadly into the new day and whistled to the mare who came at a trot to carry him back down the mountain at their usual breakneck speed. The people of the township called him King of the Maunga, or mountain and claimed he would die that way, hurled from his crazy horse at speed on the land which had swallowed his forebears for generations.

  As Logan crashed through the bush undergrowth on the capable mare, the old kauri tree on the topmost part of the mountain basked in the early rays of sunshine from the east, warming its aged back. The scarred trunk bore the names of the family, carved into its smooth, branchless bark. It was a family tree in the truest sense, beginning with the mark of a tribal chief, the rangatira and his subsequent offspring. An elderly tui bird cackled from the lower branches, sensing the disquiet in the earth as the man left the tapu sacred site, not just to grace the homestead with his presence but to leave, heading south for pastures new. He was running away again and it pained the earth, his heritage, as his ancestors cried out in dismay to a higher power to intervene.

  In the city that called the man’s name, a striking redhead rued the irritating sound of the alarm which called her out of a comfortable sleep and into the first day of a new school term. “Oh crap,” were her first words as she fell out of bed trying to turn it off. After a six week summer holiday, Hana Johal was still reluctant to rise and face the day, making herself late. In her haste she burned her toast, spilled a mug of coffee and laddered her stockings, flying out of the front door of her home feeling rumpled and unprepared for work. Shaking off the spectre of loneliness as she gripped the steering wheel, the woman fixed a smile onto her rosebud lips and studied her green eyes in the rear-view mirror, attempting to give herself a good talking to. “Get a grip, Hana.”

  With a sigh that betrayed her sense of futility, she started the engine and headed off to work at the desirable, private boys’ school in a different suburb from her own.

  A battered, white Toyota drew into the heavy traffic behind her, lurching with imperfect gear changes as it switched lanes to keep up, the driver and passenger arguing between them with bitter recriminations. Their fortuitous interception was a thing of pure chance and they bickered as they shadowed the woman into the staff car park. “I told you she would go this way!” the driver exclaimed, blaming the passenger for time wasted watching a different road into the grid locked city.

  “Well, just stick close,” her passenger bit. “But don’t do anything stupid. We have to get it back now; it’s urgent!”

  In the oversized people mover, the woman’s lovely auburn hair flew in the breeze from her open driver’s window as she hummed to a tune on the radio and parked wonkily. She was unaware of the car following far too close behind her, or the prized object which came unwittingly into her possession.

  Hana navigated her immaculately clad body between her vehicle and the one next to it. While attempting to squeeze past without dirtying her clothes she accidentally caught the strap of her handbag on the high wing mirror. She took a few steps into the car park before it yanked her backwards and she failed to see the white blur that passed far too close.

  “Hana!” A colleague cried out in alarm as the Toyota narrowly missed the oblivious woman. The school nurse clapped her hand over her mouth in shock as the car sped out onto the main road, tyres screeching as it blended into the rush hour traffic. Hana fumbled with her spewing handbag, dis
tracted. “That car nearly hit you!”

  With a pounding heart, Hana pulled her bag away from the mirror, mortified when the action sent its remaining contents tumbling to the ground. Grovelling on the floor in her smart suit and stiletto heels for lipstick and coins, she missed the astonished grey-eyed gaze of the tall newcomer as he stood transfixed to the spot. Logan’s shaking hand clutched his motorbike helmet, his eyes wide and sparkling with hope. Twenty-six wasted years of searching and there she was, grappling for the contents of her bag, the New Zealand sun streaking the red highlights in her hair. Oblivious and embarrassed, Hana gathered her belongings, unaware that a man who had loved her since her eighteenth year, watched her in agony.

  Chapter 2

  “Hana, can you get that phone please? Someone’s shoved a half-eaten apple behind this shelf and my hands are filthy!” complained the blonde woman from her kneeling position in front of a brochure rack. Hana dropped her bundle of papers onto the floor and scurried after the noise as the papers spread themselves into the walkway.

  She returned within a few seconds, chewing her lip with anxiety, her cheeks pink with embarrassment. “Er...Sheila, it’s your husband. For you. He has a problem.”

  As Sheila bustled into the office, Hana grimaced and raised her eyes to the ceiling, having already taken the full force of the caller’s discomfort. Sheila’s voice reverberated through the glass partition from the office. “You did what?”

  The high beamed, vaulted roof left the partition walls hanging, stopping in mid-air as though the builders had walked off the job half finished. Intricate wooden shapes decorated the ceiling like the inside of a church. Little angels and imps perched on the cross beams or hung from the apex, painstakingly carved into the wood of the Presbyterian school.