Vyner had to know. ‘Kane asked me all these questions,’ he began cautiously. ‘Like, “Was it something I published?” and “Who are you working for?’”
‘Nosy bitch.’
Vyner waited. He felt restless. A drink would be nice.
‘She was getting too close,’ Lottie said, coming right up to him and shouting in his face, spraying him.
‘Right.’
‘I get a phone call from Johannesburg,’ yelled Lottie. ‘Middle of the night.’
She turned inwards darkly, her face mottled and fists tight. ‘Uh-huh,’ said Vyner encouragingly.
Lottie blinked. ‘Someone I used to work with. He’s a private investigator now.’
Vyner nodded to keep her going.
‘He wanted to warn me. Tessa Kane had hired him to dig around in my past, mine and Charlie’s. I couldn’t allow that.’
And a lot of dark stuff in your past, too, Vyner thought, gazing at Lottie. ‘Getting back to Charlie: how about half of the fifteen grand you owe me up front?’
‘I don’t think so,’ said Lottie, and somehow she had a little automatic pistol in her hand, no bigger than a.25, pretty quiet, unlikely to be heard next door, given the thickness of the walls and the intervening blanket of trees outside, and she shot him in the face with it.
Vyner reeled for a bit, clutching his blasted jaw and frothing. At one point she shot him again, a punching sensation between his shoulder blades. He went down gratefully, curling up on the rug, which had been Scotchguarded recently, unless his senses were deceiving him. She fired another shot into the wall.
Time passed and he bled and his heart and lungs laboured. He was dimly aware of someone-had to be Lottie-digging around in his parka and finding his new gun, which had cost him $650 in an alley behind a pub in Collingwood.
Then later, as he bled out, there were voices. Vyner recognised Charlie Mead’s, in argument with Lottie, who sounded deranged. Who shot who, then? There was more than one shot. He dreamed. By the time he’d regained consciousness again, and was on his hands and knees, his gun was in his right hand. How had that happened? He swung his poor head and saw Charlie Mead on his back, one finger caught in the trigger-guard of Lottie’s little pistol. There was no sign of her.
Vyner crawled out to his car, uttering frightful sounds from his ravaged mouth, thinking about gunshot residue.
64
They were not the first on the scene. The first were two uniformed constables from Rosebud, requested as back-up by Challis. He arrived with Ellen to find both officers crouching behind their patrol car, guns drawn. Challis soon saw why: at the end of the Meads’ densely hedged driveway was a scene that seemed poised for grief: a yellow Magna stood on the gravelled turning circle, motor running, driver’s door open, a figure sitting behind the wheel; the main door of the house was ajar; and bright security spots cast a harsh light over everything.
‘Go around to the rear,’ Challis told one of the officers, ‘via the next-door garden. Check it out, report back by radio, but stay there. Arrest anyone who tries to run.’
‘Sir.’
They waited. A couple of minutes later, the radio crackled. ‘The door’s locked. No lights on. I can’t see or hear anyone.’
Challis thanked him. Just then the car outside the Mead’s front door shook and the engine coughed, ran raggedly and died. ‘Badly tuned, or run out of fuel,’ said the Rosebud officer. The smell of poorly burnt exhaust drifted towards them.
‘Have you called in the plate number?’ Ellen asked.
‘Stolen in Southbank this afternoon.’
‘Vyner,’ said Challis.
A minute passed. ‘Sir, the guy’s just sitting there.’
‘He could be hurt,’ said Challis, ‘dead or waiting for us to show ourselves.’
The figure seemed to move then, his shadowy form slipping, and suddenly the horn blasted and wouldn’t stop.
‘Ellen, come with me. Constable, stay here. Don’t let anyone in or out.’
‘Sir.’
They ran at a crouch to the waiting car. The man in the driver’s seat had slumped over the steering wheel. There was blood on the ground, the door, the seat, the man’s back and neck. Challis was reluctant to interfere with a body at a crime-scene, but the horn was insistent and unnerving. Besides, the man might still be alive. He grabbed the collar and pulled. The racket blessedly ceased and a bloodied mobile phone fell to the floor pan of the car. There was a pistol on the passenger seat. He stared at the ruined face and guessed that he was looking at Vyner. ‘Been shot twice. In the back and in the jaw.’
Ellen reached past and touched Vyner’s neck. ‘There’s a pulse.’
‘Call it in.’
Then they advanced on the house, keeping to either side of the open door, and entered together, making a swift, silent sweep of all the rooms, Challis feeling faintly ridiculous, as though he were watching himself in a training video. There was no one alive, only blood slicks in the hallway, leading all the way to the front door, a pool of blood on the sitting room rug, and a body, Charlie Mead, shot in the chest. But Mead had also got off a few shots: into Vyner, apparently, and into a wall of the sitting room. A small-calibre pistol lay beside his hand.
Their hearts hammering, Challis and Ellen stood for a while, willing stillness. They edged closer to each other. It was unconscious. Eventually Ellen murmured, ‘Why would Vyner want to shoot the man who’d hired him?’
The knuckles of Challis’s gun hand brushed her thigh. He holstered the gun, unwilling to step away from her. ‘Revenge, fear of discovery, money, the usual,’ he said.
Outside, dying behind the wheel of the car he’d stolen in Southbank that afternoon, Vyner wanted the woman with the gentle voice, the woman who’d placed her cool fingers on his neck and found his pulse, to come back so that he could apologise for panicking that time on the boardwalk, for almost shooting her dead. He didn’t feel like a rocky shoal, doom-maker, custodian of the codes or any other fine thing right now. He felt like a mere mortal, and a pretty dumb one at that.
But Lottie had always been several moves ahead of everyone else, he reminded himself, as he died.
Always several moves ahead.
He had a few moves of his own. Dying moves. He’d barely been able to operate the keys of his mobile phone, barely been able to spell it out for the cop with the gentle hands, given that his own hands were so slippery with the last of his blood.
But able enough.