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‘That’s it? Shouldn’t you be out there, physically searching for him? Knocking on doors or holding a press conference?’ No one likes being told how to do their job, but I was beyond caring. If being rude to a police officer was a criminal offence, then they’d just have to arrest me for it.
‘Whoa, slow down, Gemma.’ It would appear that, somewhere along the way, ‘Miss Fletcher’ had been permanently dropped. ‘I’m going to be doing plenty. But there’s one thing I definitely don’t want to do. I don’t want to have to worry about you going all Nancy Drew on me and trying to find him yourself.’
‘Wouldn’t you do that, if it was yourpartner who was missing?’
‘That’s different. I’m a police officer.’
‘And I’m the only person who truly believed there was something wrong about Finn’s disappearance. I have to do something.’
‘There’s only one thing I want you to do: stay home and let us do our job.’
‘Like you’ve been doing for the last six days, you mean.’ My criticism was a sword, and I wasn’t above wielding it.
‘I know how frustrated you must have felt this past week. But now’s not the time for finger pointing. Now is the time to find your fiancé. I’m going to send a patrol car to the area and ask them to travel the route Mr Douglas would have taken that night.’ He paused, and I could almost hear him looking for the right way to phrase his next request. ‘And I want you to promise that you’ll keep your phone close to hand and wait for news.’
My mouth opened and closed like a goldfish in silent protest. Did he really think that asking me to stay meekly in my flat was a reasonable request?
‘This storm is going to make the search hard enough, without my officers having to worry about you as well. I’d much rather direct all of our efforts and resources into finding Finn.’
Bravo, excellently done, I thought with wry admiration. He knew the last thing I’d want to do was hamper the search. ‘Okay. I’ll stay by my phone,’ I promised.
‘Good,’ said Inspector Graham, who might have known a great deal about police procedure but knew very little about women, as it turned out. ‘I’ll be back in touch as soon as I have some news.’
My finger was still on the icon disconnecting the call as I ran towards my bedroom and pulled a heavy wax jacket and a pair of waterproof boots from the wardrobe. Mushroom Cottage was a two-hour drive away, in normal weather conditions. But with luck I would get there by early afternoon. I assumed the patrol car would be starting their search from the petrol station, so it made sense to begin mine from the opposite end of the route.
My fingers drummed impatiently beside the call button for the lift before I abandoned it and headed for the stairwell. After a week of inactivity, I was suddenly driven by the need to keep moving. Perhaps it was the ominous weather conditions or the latent power of Storm Edna, but it felt very much as though time was fast running out.
I’d only got as far as the floor below mine when I rocked to a sudden halt. There was something I’d forgotten. I glanced upwards at the flight of concrete stairs, wasting a few more valuable seconds in debate, before swearing softly under my breath and turning around. I pounded back up the stairs I’d just run down.
I left my front door swinging open as I tore through the flat and shot into the bedroom, where I snatched up the item I’d come back for and dropped it into the deep pocket of my wax jacket.
I must have driven in the rain hundreds of times before, but never in a storm like that. The wipers, even at full speed, were hardly clearing the windscreen at all. Throughout the morning, the weather forecasters had been warning people to stay off the roads unless their journey was of vital importance. Looking for your fiancé who’d been missing for the last six days most definitely qualified as vitally important, as far as I was concerned.
I felt no guilt at doing the exact opposite to what I’d been instructed. ‘And my phoneisclose at hand,’ I assured Inspector Graham in my head as I glanced down at my mobile on the passenger seat beside me.
This wasn’t the kind of journey where you played music, but I drove with the news channel on, turned up loud so I could hear it over the pounding rain and the constant spray beneath my tyres. The storm updates were frequent and far from encouraging. Many areas were flooded, some completely cut off. Power lines had been brought down by the winds, and whole towns were without electricity. It sounded apocalyptic. Storm Edna would go down in the history books.
I drove hunched over the steering wheel, peering intently through the wedge-shaped gaps in the deluge that were all the windscreen wipers were able to give me. The wax jacket was too stiff and uncomfortable to drive in, but I refused to waste even the minute or two it would have cost me to pull over and slip it off. I knew that time would prove to be either my enemy or my friend today, and it was disconcerting not to know which.
34
FINN
He’d known heavy downpours before – Australia was famous for them – but this storm was something else. The rain had been falling for hours and still showed no sign of stopping.Thank God, thought Finn as he closed his eyes to the satisfying sound of the cup slowly collecting it, drop by drop. The rainwater had taken an excruciatingly long time to filter through the heavy canopy of undergrowth, but finally the beaker had filled. Quietly congratulating himself, he’d carefully drawn the cup back into the car. It had been a brilliant idea – quickly followed by a totally stupid one. He should have known that his stomach would never cope with such a huge intake of water in one hit. His body had convulsed like a cat with a furball, unable to retain the water.
Swearing like a marine, Finn thrust the cup back out into the thorny bushes to begin the process all over again. His eyes had closed, and he’d drifted into the weird state straddling the boundary between sleep and unconsciousness that had become his new normal.
The dream was vivid. He was on a beach – Bondi, maybe, although he’d never known it that empty. With a surfboard beneath his arm, he’d run into the sea and paddled out. Everything felt so real: the heat of the sun on his back, the wax on the board where it stuck to his chest, the gentle lapping sound of water beneath him. He waited for the perfect wave, and when it came, he jumped to his feet and rode it to shore, hearing the echo of its roar as it crested behind him.
Finn’s eyes flew open and for a moment the line between dream and reality remained blurred, for he could still hear the rumbling wave, still feel the splash of spray against his face. He turned his head just in time to witness the nightmare of a storm surge of water thundering towards him. The cracked rear windscreen was no match for the miniature tsunami. It splintered and imploded as dirty, debris-strewn floodwater filled the car.
It kept coming, and Finn struggled to haul himself clear of the rising water, finding a strength he’d thought had gone. The pain in his leg was like nothing he’d ever known as he pulled against the metal that was impaling him there. Huge grey dots clouded his vision, but he shook his head to dispel them. If he lost consciousness now, the game really would be over.
After what seemed like an eternity, the torrent finally slowed. The gully was filled with about three feet of water, and although it was no longer gushing into the car, it still posed a very real threat. The seat beside him was practically submerged. Had his car flipped the other way into the gully, it would have been the driver’sside beneath the water, instead of the passenger one. Even now, the water was only a foot below his face. And it was still raining. Heavily. Unless it stopped very soon, the water level inside the car was just going to get higher and higher.
The rain was going to kill him.
35
