The Dead & The Drowning

by Cameron Bell

  “Something has happened Bell … I'm not sure what yet. Just know that I'm okay and that I'm coming home. I got to go.”

  “No Dad ...”

  “Listen! I'm fine I've got something to do then I'll call you I promise.”

  I terminate the call and tap the torch app. I examine my surroundings and I am in a clot of coniferous trees littered with pine needles. Downwards, several feet away at the base of a fur tree I spot my travel bag and coat heaped together. The tree I am next to is deciduous and has shed most of its leaves and only a few shrivelled ones remain to fall. I pull the towel from my neck and it is one that I had packed in my travel bag. The belt is mine and has been taken from my waist. The broken branch which the belt is looped around is as thick as a rolled-up newspaper. It is dry to the touch and on the verge of being rotten. It is a branch that given the choice you would not have used, however the fur trees offered little else for a ligature point. The stub which the branch has snapped from comes off the trunk of a skinny, grey tree, and is just over six feet off the ground. Considering the length of the belt, I work out that I would have hung partially suspended in a position between sitting and standing up.

  I realize I hadn't done this myself. I had been drugged and brought here, strung up with my own belongings and left to die. If I had been religious I would have given thanks to a higher power, but I'm not so I don't. The truth of it is if the branch had been perhaps a fraction stronger I'd be dead. If they had taken me to another location I'd probably be dead. There is no miracle here, there is only bad judgement and dumb luck. I had hung not long enough to die, though long enough for them to think that I would before they left. It was a narrow ledge on which my life had been balanced, such a thin margin of seconds. How many forty, twenty, ten – I would never know except that death was decided in seconds, and sometimes their fractions. The equation made me livid.

  I open the messages on my phone and on the way see the eight missed calls that I had received. I still have my glasses and I read what had been text.

  To those I love I'm so sorry. I can't go on without Beth, my life is misery without her. I have to end it here and now. Sorry I love you all, Dad.

  The message had been sent to Nathan and Annabel at 20:29 and it is now 04:41. Nathan hadn't responded to the text, so I send him a message that it had been sent by someone in spite. I send the same message to Annabel to offer some explanation for the suicide note.

  I am as cold as the grave, and I lumber to my coat to put it on. The hanging had nearly killed me and now the cold is having a try. I would have to get indoors and get some warmth soon, but first I needed a few evidential photographs of this nice little scene: a fine set up, nothing alien, all contained, no sign of third-party involvement – neat. The directional arrows pointed to suicide; she had seen to that and the messages to love ones off a coded phone closed the book. I take a couple of wide, encompassing shots and a close-up of each individual component in the staged suicide.

  I collect the towel, belt and bag, then using the torch on the phone stagger downwards through the thicket in hope that there is a road or something beyond. I get whipped in the face by scraggy branches before finding a track that leads abruptly out onto open hillside, and a panoramic view of Isafjordur at night. Below is the tightly lit scimitar shaped peninsula, and across the black simmering water the runway lights of the airport.

  They hadn't bothered going far to dump me; I am no more than three hundred yards as the crow flies from the old man's house. Then a shard of memory like a piece of glass from a shattered bottle, whose fragments had been scattered is tread upon, and the memory enters like pain. Jon is swollen at the door. The image is vivid and by concentrating I hear him wheeze and see him crumble and suffocate in front of the fire. Accompanied by the thought I walk down the hill onto a road. The road I need to get to is the one below and huddling into my coat, with vapour billowing from my mouth into the frigid night air, I grind the yards.

  I round the bend to the street and see headlights drawing near. I duck next to a parked car and the interior of the car is lit up by the passing beams. My heart convulses and nausea rises with a prickle of sweat. I vomit a soup like sick and the head pounds in unison with the heart. I cough and spit the acid leftovers from my throat and breathe deeply; my hands trembling from a cocktail of poisons. I walk to the house; the Ranger is in its space and a red Volvo that had been there before is next to it.

  I get to the gate when another memory returns, and it is Toni sashaying in silk pyjamas, tantalising with curves and whisky. It turns my stomach how easily she pulled me in and played me out - dispensed callously like a loyal cart horse sent to the knacker’s yard. But I reserve much of the ire for myself – I had been led, but when I had not been led I had stepped forward, indeed ran headlong.

  ◆◆◆

  An incandescent moon sears a hole through night’s black mantle. Its fullness intrudes, looming over me like it is falling from the sky. The garden trees swish as I climb the steps and I take no care not to be seen, because in my bones I know them to be long gone. I'm here for Jon, in the slim chance that he is clinging onto a scrap of life. I enter through the damaged back door that will prove the sticking point in passing Jon's death off as misadventure. The table is back in place and the gold is gone. Jon is down on his knees with the left ear to the wooden floor as though he were trying to hear rats scurrying underneath the floorboards. I had found a heroin addict overdosed in the same position, belt wound around the bicep and needle still in the forearm.

  The fire has burnt out to grey, white ash and a chill has returned to the room. I bend down to him, his face squashed into the floor, the blood migrating down, pooling into his compressed features. The hands waxy and lifeless cold are locked in rigor - I don't need to see any more.

  I stand up and notice an empty tumbler on a side table next to the sunken chair, and maybe it is significant. The gruesome ballooning was anaphylactic shock and it had shut his airway and choked him dead. Jon was severely allergic to nuts, so how had Toni got Jon to consume something containing them? I don't have the answer, but I can point the police in the right direction. I'll tell them about the gold and how it turned murderous. I'll show them the photographs of the treasure; then it comes to me that Toni didn't want or have her picture taken and is not in the video. In hindsight you could put the pieces together, but what good is that when the treachery has occurred, and the blood has already been spilled.

  I open the gallery of my phone and a stomach already off kilter dives. The photographs and video are gone, deleted, wiped from history. I nod with a grudging respect and sigh; assuming the expression I'd seen criminals make when they had reached the end of the line and had nowhere to go.

  What did I have: a fanciful story, a busted door and a dead man on the floor that witnesses could say I had been looking for? Toni is in the wind, possibly a figment of my imagination or a scapegoat for guilty lies. Only Marcus, Adam and Marta, a line of scurrilous shitbags to back me up – I don't want to get caught in that crossfire.

  I had to see it from a cop's perspective, if I am looking at it and it isn't me. I have diminishing credibility, I am someone on the slide, someone that would get into deep trouble, someone who you wouldn't blink an eye if they hung themselves. I can't take the chance with what I got, it could backfire badly - I've got to get proof. I go to the kitchen, to the rack and unhook the Ranger keys and return to the gnawing cold. I see the spade struck into the soil and pull it free – there is a job to be done, a reckoning to come.

  Chapter 27

  I search for further fragments of a nightmare and the ugly, unsettling pieces I don't need I find. I sift and pan the splintered, obfuscated memories knowing that there is a nugget of importance to be found. The clock in the Ranger reads 5:12, time is running out and it prompts the question why? Then from the bowels of my brain the answer surfaces - because they are flying out of the country in the morning. Then I remember the lavender bath and the phone conversation, and
that I'd been smart enough to make a note.

  Bildudalur Airport 8am, Cessna 210 Centurion N771DH Kyle Banks.

  I pick up a can of Red Bull from the drinks holder and put the phone in its place. It is a two hour and thirty-eight minute drive along the blue line of the screen, passing through Pingeyri and then further south and west along another fjord. I crack open the Red Bull, start the engine and turn the heaters on full. I swing the Ranger out, drive cautiously to the limits of town and then press hard. The headlights at full beam push the dark away from a desolate road and I urge the Ranger on. Slowing just enough before the bends then surging through, riding the road and the edge of an impaired ability.

  My head is clearer than when I took the phone call, though I feel worse. The sickness is the queasy, green about the gills variety you'd get if you sucked on an exhaust pipe; and I have to pull into a side track before Pingeyri to be sick. I bring up acrid bile, then retch next to nothing and my brain pulsates. I crawl back in the cab, beads of bad sweat rolling from brow to cheek and a loathing for her festers in my rotting gut. I vent it on the accelerator slamming it to the floor and zigzag back onto the road.

  The bridge over the fjord is reached, and as it is crossed thoughts of the previous night's crossing perturb. Then I had been giddy on possibility, excited by discovery and eager to beat a fresh, new path. Now in the wreckage of that I am more jaded than ever.

  In Pingeyri I turn left and head further south on the Vestfjaroarvegur into the hinterland and a single lane dirt road. And save for the faint witness of the moon now dampened behind sailing grey clouds, it is solitary and utmost dark, as black as her stone heart. The road winds, and is at times indistinct from the stony, barren terrain that surrounds.

  It is a demanding drive and I am keyed into it, my left hand busy with the gears, the feet hot stepping the accelerator, brake and clutch. The road lowers into another fjord and I thunder down it, and then follow the road east around its bank. The dirt road then veers from the shore inland and south again. Sixty miles in and I hit a fork in the road and carve a fast right turn causing a storm of small stones to plink off the undercarriage. The car clock reads 7:06 and according to the map there is nearly another thirty miles to the airport.

  Out of a bend our headlights lock and reducing speed I dip the beam. I pull off the road and resting on a slight tilt give way to the oncoming car. Cruising, slowly into the headlights I see the livery and emergency roof lights of a police patrol car. I had been on the opposite side of this situation countless times, scrutinizing a driver looking for giveaways and tells, waiting for my gut to speak. I would often just look and know, like an article of faith that the person behind the wheel was worth a pull and listening to my gut I'd take a punt. It was a gamble where if you weren't right you didn't lose, so I played fast and loose and some said I was lucky, but luck had nothing to do with it – you make your own luck, and I have the fear and hatred to prove it. Now the eyes are on me and I have something to hide. I am driving a murdered man's car and if they pull me and ask a couple of basic questions I'm stuffed.

  The trick is not to give that away with furtive behaviour like shielding your face with your shoulder or rubbing your nose. I choose to give the cops eye contact, not too much to indicate hostility or over watchfulness, yet not too little to suggest avoidance and apprehension. I attempt to project the coolness of a man going about his daily business. So, I nod and smile to the cop driving, when he acknowledges with a wave my courtesy in letting him pass. The time played a part too. At this time of the morning they were probably the night shift coming back late from a shout. They’d have blinkers on with only bed on their minds.

  I drive west and the road re-joins a jagged coastline overlooked by white, flat topped mountains, their sides bare and deeply grooved. I enter a narrow bay just before Bildudalur, the blue line short on the sat nav, the last direction a double back right turn on the other side. I glance at the digital clock and see the digits change to 07:50. There is ten minutes to take off. I know little about small aircraft; however, I estimate that this close to take off they'd have finished loading and prepping the plane and are probably on board.

  Black has morphed to a bruised blue in twilight, and I see the runway like a jetty in the water running parallel to the road. I stop the car and grab the big lensed binoculars from the back seat.

  The airport is unassuming and is crafted much like the one at Isafjordur, though more basic and provincial still. It has a modest blue and white building with a watchtower as a terminal. There is a rough car park with a Nissan Qashqai, and a silver SUV with a yellow light on the roof parked inside. Alongside the terminal there is a single strip runway with a staggered white line down the centre, and upon it a small red and white single propeller aircraft. The boarding steps are down and from behind the plane a figure emerges. He is a gawky looking man with narrow shoulders and wispy salt and pepper hair. He wears a red flight suit with zips, patches and neoprene seals - I make him to be Kyle. Kyle checks the wing and then climbs up the steps into the plane. A few seconds later Toni also wearing a red flight suit comes from behind the plane, however hers is only worn half on with the arms tied around the waist. She briefly looks up in my direction, her beautifully crooked face framed in the lens, and in this moment I burn to be viewing this image through the scope of my Tikka .204. Placing the crosshair on her forehead, setting the trigger, and with a soft squeeze sending a bullet to empty the awful contents of her head.

  She hops up the steps onto the plane and I transform hostile thought into hostile action. I toss the binoculars onto the back seat, get up the dialler on the phone and hastily press 112. As it starts to ring I put the Ranger in gear and go. One eye on the road the other on the plane as it taxis along the runway. I drive to the acute turn and take a wide arc into the road. The call handler answers and in staccato I blurt,

  “I am William Cutter at Bildudalur Airport, suspects in the murder of Jon Einarsson of twenty-two Hildevargur, Isafjordur, fleeing the country in a Cessna 210. On board valuable Viking artefacts, I am apprehending.”

  He says something but I have tuned out, occluding the extraneous my vision tunnelling to a gap between the terminal and runway's rocky edge. I shoot through the gap and straighten out onto the strip. I floor the accelerator and shifting through gears the needle rises. Ahead the plane reaches the end of the runaway and the Ranger hurtles towards it like a rocket - a rocket hell bent on destruction. I fix on the plane, the periphery of my vision streaming lines whooshing past. The plane manoeuvres into a take-off position exposing its flank and where I will spear it. Just over a hundred yards out I cut over half the speed, and as I close I lock eyes with their terror. Jaw clenched, gripping the wheel I brace myself for the impact.

  ◆◆◆

  In a cacophony of clashing metal, the Ranger rams into the undercarriage taking out the landing gear shoving the plane off the strip. The bonnet crumples, the windscreen fractures and I rock in the seat. The Cessna keels over onto the rocks, a wing impaled in the water holding the fuselage on the waterline. The Ranger halts a few feet from the edge with steam emanating from a broken radiator.

  I unbuckle the seatbelt and force the door open, pull the spade from the back seat and stride the few steps to the rocky bank; the smell of battery acid and salty sea air in my nostrils. The cockpit door swings open and falls back on itself. It then flies open and hangs on its hinge. Two hands grip the frame of the door and like a baby chick straining to get out of its shell, Kyle gasping with red faced exertion inches himself out of the plane. Unable to steady himself he flops out like a fish hauled onto a ship's deck.

  Stoked by vengeance the ills fade and thrown back ten years I skip over the rocks as I used to when running over hard terrain. He is getting up when I get to him. I seize a clump of hair and roughly drag him yelping and stumbling up the ragged, sharp volcanic rock. I lose the spade and release my right hand from his hair. He straightens up and his eyes are saucers of disbelief, and hands float up
in front of a slack aghast mouth, open and placatory. Kyle is the proverbial deer in the headlights, frozen in front of a dead man standing. Gruffly, I spit,

  “We haven't been properly introduced.”

  I whip a mean, jaw jarring left hook around an impotent defence and knock him over like a well struck skittle. I leave him sprawled out with his eyes rolled into the back of his head and his foot twitching. With the underling taken care of I return to the Cessna to deal with the queen. She is not traversing the rocks or clawing her way out of the plane. I scan the water and shore, then I run to each point and visually search along the sides of the strip - concluding she must still be in the Cessna.

  The airport SUV with its amber light flashing is tearing along the runway. I hop across the rocks and the wing propping up the plane gives way and the fuselage drops below the waterline. I clamber on board and crawl towards the cockpit. The stinging cold sea laps over, and the plane an uncertain platform undulates with my weight. Peering inside I see Toni on her right side. Her head is craning above the water and she is trapped in her seat. The water is gushing in, enveloping her in an icy embrace and reaching for a forever kiss. She thrashes at the cross harness holding her in the seat. Strapped in a seat of execution, the cockpit the chamber and I presiding, passing sentence.

  “Help me!” she gasps in the throes of panic, bucking against the restraint and ripping ineffectually at the release buckle with her left hand; the right arm seemingly stuck against her side. The worst of my nature would watch her drown for what she'd done, but I need her alive. The water is at her neck and I don't have long to save her. I remember the knife she had. The compact, black bladed lock knife that she produced from a pocket in that brown leather jacket.

  I lower myself in and precariously balance with one foot on an armrest and the other on the dashboard. There is the sound of scraping metal and the plane lurches. I tense every muscle fibre holding position, aware that this could become my coffin too.