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I don’t feel guilty for walking away from him, for leaving him locked in the shed. It wasn’t about him experiencing something of what I went through, although I’m glad there are no windows, and that he won’t be rescued until the woman with dark hair, who I presume is his partner, wonders why he hasn’t turned up for dinner. What I can’t bear is the thought of him hearing my distress when I believed him to be dead. He has seen too much of me.
I call the airline, and arrange my return journey for Sunday, two days away. I’d like to leave tomorrow but I will have to see Hunter, because there are still things I need to know. But he can come to me. He’ll guess that I’m staying in Akaroa, it won’t take him long to find me. And he will come and find me, because we have unfinished business.
But he doesn’t come, not that evening nor the next day. Early on Sunday morning—my flight is at eight in the evening, and I still need to pack—I march up the hill to the house, burning with resentment that I’m having to go to him. I’m hoping the woman will be there; I want her to know the truth, that she’s living with a man who kidnaps young women.
The truck is there but there doesn’t seem to be anyone around, so I sit down to wait. It’s awhile before it dawns on me that everything is exactly as it was when I left two days before. The truck is parked in exactly the same place, the door is still open and, when I take a closer look, Hunter’s phone is there on the dashboard. I feel a flash of fear—is it possible that no one has come, that Hunter is still in the shed? What if the woman wasn’t his partner but someone involved in the building project, or a friend, someone who wouldn’t worry if they didn’t see him for a few days? My fear spirals; it will have been stifling in the shed, what if he didn’t have water?
I have the key to the padlock, I’ve had it with me since Hunter pushed it under the door.
I hurry to the shed, scared to go inside, scared of what I might find.
My fingers tremble as I insert the key into the padlock. I snap it open, push open the door, sending a shaft of light into its dark interior. At first,I can’t see anything. But as my eyes begin to adjust to the gloom, I see him lying on the floor under a piece of tarpaulin.
“No,” I whisper. “No.”
Shaking with dread, I force myself forward, crouch down, pull back the tarpaulin. A wave of relief washes over me. There’s nothing there, it’s just tarpaulin, it only looked as if there was a body underneath.
“A trick I learned from you.”
I spin around. Hunter is standing in the doorway.
“If I hadn’t been able to knock out a panel, I’d be dead.”
“I thought—”
“That you’d leave me to die?”
As he starts to move toward me, I grab a plank of wood from the floor.
“Don’t come any closer!”
He stops, raises his hands.
“Start talking,” I say. “From where you left off. And if you so much as move, I swear I’ll kill you.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
“When you came back from Las Vegas with Ned,” Hunter begins, “I believed what everyone else believed, that you’d been in a secret relationship with him for months.”
“But you knew about his attack on Justine at that point; you knew what he was. Why didn’t you say anything to me?”
“I thought you’d married Ned because you loved him. I thought you’d been playing with me, and I was annoyed.”
“But you must have seen the way Ned was with me during that press interview. You were standing behind us, you must have seen that I was trying to get away, go to Carolyn. If you had helped me, I might have been able to save Lina, save Carolyn.”
“Their deaths weren’t down to you, Amelie. Lina would have gone to the house no matter what. And I’m sorry, but as far as I was concerned, you were Mrs. Hawthorpe.”
“Never,” I say through gritted teeth. “I was never Mrs. Hawthorpe. I was going to kill Ned. The night we were kidnapped, I planned to go to his bedroom when he was asleep and use his phone to call the police. If he refused to give it to me, I was going to kill him. I couldn’tthink of any other way out; I was scared that if I didn’t kill him, he would kill me.”
“Which is exactly what he planned to do.”
With the light coming through the open door behind him, it’s hard to see his face. “What? When?”
“That same night. But I need to rewind a bit.” He pauses. “Wouldn’t you rather do this outside, in the sun?”
“I’m fine where I am.”
“Okay. After Lina died, Carl found a file in her apartment with the names of five young women, all ex-employees ofExclusives, who Ned had sexually assaulted, along with details of payments Ned had made to buy their silence. There was also a recording where four of the girls had detailed what had happened to them. Carl passed the file on to Mr. Smith. Coupled with the disappearances of Justine and Lina, it was a step too far, and an order came for Ned to be handed over before he could do any more damage to the foundation. Carl knew it meant Ned would be killed, but he didn’t care; on the contrary, he thought Ned was getting off lightly. He wanted to make Ned suffer for Lina’s murder physically, mentally, and emotionally and told Mr. Smith that he wanted to keep Ned for a while before handing him over. Mr. Smith agreed. But there was a flaw; if Ned suddenly disappeared, the police would look for him, and if he was eventually found murdered, the police would dig to find out why he’d been murdered, and the foundation would be damaged anyway. Mr. Smith asked Carl to find a solution.”
