‘And Judith? Don’t forget, please, that I’m very good with cameras. This whole area is under surveillance. I’ll know if you try to break the rules. And then you can be the one to bring Cameron’s body back to his dad.’ Ruth ended the call.
Fuck.Fuck.Judith drew in a shaking, shuddering breath. Her phone was still in her hand. She could call Rocky, ask for help... except she couldn’t. The phone was loaded with malware. If she called Rocky—if she called anyone—Ruth would know.
The phone buzzed with a message. It contained a dropped pin on a map. Judith clicked on it and it loaded to her maps app. The location was marked as Devil’s Elbow Scenic Viewpoint, Great Ocean Road: a spot very close to the place where Ruth Hall had grown up as Renée Palmer. The distance from her location was one hundred and thirty-six point eight kilometres. Predicted journey time was just under two hours.
Jesus Christ. Judith’s watch was counting down the minutes. She had an hour and thirty-eight minutes until Ruth’s deadline.
There was no time. No time for anything. She was either going, or not going. Trying, or not trying. She had no gun. She had no phone, or none that she could use to make a call. Judith picked up her keys and helmet. She took a knife from the knife block and a torch from the cupboard, and then she was running down the stairs, three steps at a time.
This was a trap; a glaringly obvious trap, but she could not see any way out.
Judith hated herself for all her failures. For Katy, most of all. For her failure with Miriam Hall, her failure to save her own mother from the bizarre fantasy life she lived, and for all her other screw-ups. But she didn’t want to die. She wanted to go on being a cop, doing a difficult job as well as she could, though of course that was no longer an option.
Was Katy dead? She must be, surely. She’d seen Katy fall between the tracks, seen her disappear under the wheels of the train. No one could survive that. But she had to pretend it hadn’t happened. Judith desperately needed a future that included Friday night drinks with Katy and Saturday morning runs on the Tan. She wanted to feel the sun on her face, to curl up in bed and hear the rain against her window. She wanted to get on her bike and drive to Katy’s house, or to the hospital where please,pleasegod Katy must surely be, with expert doctors even now saving her life. She wanted to be with her friend.
She wanted Cameron Miller safe home with his father. Was she ready to give up her life for his?
She was not.
But did she have a choice?
Downstairs, Judith strapped on her helmet. She took her leather jacket from her bike’s storage and zipped that on too. She put the torch, the knife and her phone into the storage compartment, and then she was off.
The ride to the coast was brutal. Judith broke every speed limit, half-hoping, half-dreading being pulled over by a cop for speeding. If she was stopped, in a perfect world she could have that cop escort her the rest of the way while he radioed Rocky about the situation. But the reality was that she’d get caught in some asinine conversation, trying to explain something that was hopelessly complicated, and all the time the clock would be running down. Rain started to fall when she was still half an hour out. The sudden downpour made the roads slippery as hell.
By the time Judith reached Devil’s Elbow it was full dark and she had only three minutes left on her timer. For a scenic viewpoint it wasn’t much. Just a layover, a place for people to park during the day when they wanted to take in the view of the ocean below. She pulled in and saw Elsa Anderson’s car abandoned there. How the hell had that been missed? Hadn’t officers from Lorne and Anglesea been asked to look for it?
Judith turned off her engine.
‘Ruth?’ she called. There was no answer. The rain was getting heavier. There were no streetlights, and the clouds were too thick for moonlight. The lights from Judith’s bike lit up the area directly ahead of her but threw everything else into absolute darkness. She turned the lights off, and took out her torch. It was a tactical torch, issued by the department. It was waterproof, gave off twenty-six hundred lumens and had extra tough ceramic strike points for breaking glass. None of which was likely to help her in what was coming.
Judith got off the bike. She took the knife from the storage compartment and slid it into her pants pocket.
‘Ruth?’ Judith called again. She turned around three hundred and sixty degrees, holding the torch in front of her like a talisman. She saw an empty road, a crash barrier at the ocean side, and nothing but bushland and rain in every direction.
Her phone buzzed again. Another message, another dropped pin. She clicked on the message, and the route loaded to her maps app. It showed a short hike through bushland and then down, somehow, to a lower elevation. Three hundred metres. Three hundred metres to go. Judith started walking. She had to climb over the crash barrier, and then turn sharply right, pushing her way through heavy undergrowth. The thought occurred to her that at least any self-respecting snake would be tucked away out of the weather. The thought was swiftly followed by the realisation that snakes were the least of her worries. She was going to die here. Either because she took a step off a cliff in the dark, or because she was going to walk, unarmed, right up to Ruth Hall, who would shoot her in the fucking head.
Judith found herself at the edge of a cliff. The drop was fifteen metres or more. She could hear the waves crashing far below, but still she couldn’t see them. If it wasn’t for her torch she would be able to see nothing at all. Judith checked her phone again. The path was clear. She was supposed to make her way down somehow. But how? She searched up and down the edge of the cliff and then, half-hidden, she found the first of a series of steps, rough-hewn into the rock. The steps must have been a hundred years old. They were uneven and clumsy, overgrown with tussock and salt grasses.
Judith took her first step downwards and felt true fear grip her. This would be such an easy place to die. The rain kept coming. She was soaked through, her hair plastered to her face. The steps were slippery. Judith sat where she could, moving from step to step on her bottom like a small child making their way down a set of stairs. In the distance, lightning flashed brilliantly over the water, followed by a low, threatening rumble of thunder. The breath was coming faster in Judith’s lungs, her hands and her legs were shaking, and then she was finally down, her feet planted firmly in wet sand, all the courage already blown out of her.
She was on a small semi-circular beach at the base of the cliffs. The waves were so loud now that she was close, just a few steps away. Was the tide coming in or out? Could she make it back up those stairs if she had to? Her stomach clenched at the thought of trying. The beach was empty. Still no Ruth. Judith called Ruth’s name, once, then twice, then a third time. She explored the limits of the beach, and found a narrow fissure, an opening in the cliffside. The fissure was tight but there was nowhere else to go other than into the water or back up the cliff face. Judith took a deep breath, let it out, and squeezed through.
She found herself in a narrow tunnel with a sand floor, the ceiling a little too low for her to stand at full height. Judith bent over and started walking. She allowed her torch to play over the walls of the tunnel. It seemed to her that there were tool markings on the rock. Had someone made this place? No... the tunnel had been formed by nature, by the movement of water over thousands of years. People had just come along later and made their own mark, widening the tunnel, increasing its height. And then they’d, what, forgotten about it?
There was water standing in pools, some of them ankle deep. This tunnel might fill again at high tide. Judith picked up her pace, then slowed as she turned a corner and saw light coming from up ahead. She turned off her torch, suddenly afraid that it would give her away, and stood, blinking, waiting for her eyesight to adjust. She slid the knife out of her pocket with her right hand, and held the torch in her left, then made her way slowly forward again, towards the light.
Chapter Thirty-One
The tunnel opened up into an enormous cavern. The centre of the cavern was a dark pit of nothingness. If there was a bottom to that pit, it was far too deep for her to make out. Directly in front of her, before the floor fell away, there was a narrow ledge. The ledge formed a path that led away to the left, clinging, it seemed, to the cavern wall and leading around the gaping pit and upwards to the other side of the cavern.
Ruth Hall stood on the other side, on a stone platform. She had a gun in her hand and a lantern at her feet. Beside the lantern, Cameron Miller was on his knees, his hands folded behind his head, the expression on his face a mute plea for help. It was as if Judith had entered a theatre with an elevated stage, except that where the seating should be, there was nothing at all, just an endless drop. The only way to reach where Ruth was standing was that narrow exposed path to the left.
‘Hello,’ Ruth said. ‘I like your knife.’
Adrenaline flooded through Judith’s body. It was like someone had reached inside her and turned up the dial on every one of her senses. She could taste the sea on the air, smell seaweed and her own sweat, hear the drip-drip of water falling from stalactites.
‘You look different,’ Judith said, trying for a steady tone of voice and not quite managing it. ‘When I met you in the police station your hair was dark. You had the goth make-up. The piercings.’ The woman standing in front of her was Celine without the accent. Blonde and pretty and looking like butter wouldn’t melt—if you ignored the gun in her hand and the boy at her feet. ‘Which version is the real you?’