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‘That’s why you’re here. It’s why I called for help and why we’re trying to move fast. The local police sergeant—the police force here consists of exactly one—has called for reinforcements and a team of locals is combing the bushland around the wreck. You see, the cargo hold’s covered in blood. It looks like a massacre took place in there. But there’s no one. When we arrived the plane was still cooling. The pilot was strapped into his seat, dead. Everyone else had disappeared.’
‘Everyone else?’
‘I’d say at least two people have bled in that plane.’ He grimaced. ‘But then what would I know? You’re the expert.’
She hesitated. This was impossible.
If she’d known Alistair would be here then she would have asked a colleague to come in her stead, but she was here now. She had a job to do and she needed this man’s co-operation.
‘Alistair, we need to work together on this one.’
‘We do.’ His face was grim.
‘So can we set aside our…past…and get to work?’
‘I’ve never let anything get in the way of my work.’
‘Well, bully for you,’ she said with a sudden spurt of anger. ‘So let’s just keep it that way and leave the personal innuendos alone. Tell me about the pilot.’
‘I don’t—’
‘Just tell me about the pilot,’ she said, and there was suddenly a wealth of weariness in her voice that couldn’t be disguised. She caught herself, hauling herself tightly together. She’d learned that Alistair Benn was the doctor in charge of the Dolphin Cove hospital only when she’d already been in the plane on her way here, and it had been too late to tell the pilot to turn around and go back. She’d seen his name in the report she was reading, and then had spent the rest of the trip schooling her features in the way she wanted him to see them. She wasn’t about to drop that façade now.
No. He couldn’t see her as she so often felt—so vulnerable she felt raw. She had to turn her weariness to annoyance. ‘You’re not about to slow this investigation down, are you?’ she snapped, and watched his face tighten again.
‘Of course not.’
‘Then tell me everything,’ she said. ‘Now.’
There was another moment of tense silence. He was regrouping, too, she thought. Good. Control was the issue here. Work.
And it seemed he agreed with her as he began to speak.
‘We thought it was a regular plane crash,’ Alistair told her. ‘But, as I said, the pilot wasn’t injured badly enough to explain his death. And the blood in the rear compartment suggested someone—or more than one—had been thrown around and badly injured in the process. The rear’s been set up for storage. There are no seats. No seat belts. If anyone was sitting in the back when it crashed they’ll have been thrown about heavily. But there’s no sign of anyone. We’ve had people searching for almost twenty-four hours now.’
‘And the pilot?’
‘That’s the reason why you in particular have been called in,’ he told her. ‘We carried his body back to the hospital. Because I couldn’t figure out how he died, I ran routine blood tests on him. I sent the samples down to the city with the mail plane last night and this morning the results came back. This guy has a king-sized dose of heroin on board. Huge. He didn’t shoot this amount up unless it was a suicide attempt.’ He told her the figures and Sarah whistled.
‘So maybe someone stuck a needle into him and shot him sky-high?’ she said slowly. She frowned. ‘Murder by overdose is common. Can you see any needle stick marks?’
‘I can’t. As I said, he’s a bit battered. An entry may be hidden by injury. But surely no one’s going to stick a needle into a pilot flying a plane, causing it to crash?’
‘So maybe it crashed and then he was murdered?’
‘Right.’
‘You don’t believe it?’ she asked, and watched his face.
‘Well, you’re the expert. But there was no reason for the plane to crash—or not that we can see. The pilot of the mail plane had a look at the crash site before he left last night. Harry knows his stuff. He said the plane was low on fuel, but not so low that it’d crash—the low fuel levels would be the reason it didn’t explode. But everything else seems to be mechanically sound. In fact, Harry reckoned he could probably haul it off the rocks, do a bit of superficial work and have her flying again.’
‘But the injuries…?’
‘A bit of the cliff face came through the windscreen, hitting the pilot. Not badly—just enough to give him cuts and abrasions. Maybe it was enough to make him lose consciousness, but I doubt it. That’s another thing that doesn’t fit with him being murdered. He hasn’t shifted from where he was when the plane hit and there’s nothing that would have stopped him moving. He was securely belted in. The people in the cargo hold, though… As I said, they must have been flying without seat belts.’
‘So where are they? And how many?’
‘We don’t know. We’re hoping you might be able to tell us.’
‘Right.’ Could she? She sat back and thought about it.
Dr Sarah Rose was good at her job. She liked it. Forensic medicine hadn’t been her first choice, but since she’d taken it on she’d found it more and more satisfying. Solving mysteries through medicine. Keeping away from people…
No. Don’t go down that road.
She looked out of the Land Cruiser window at the dying light, but she wasn’t seeing the scenery. Her mind was on injured people lost in the bush. People who were depending on her to solve a mystery.
She needed to concentrate on work, which was just the way she wanted it. Especially now. Especially when she wanted so badly to keep her mind from the man beside her.
‘Do we know who the pilot is?’
‘We have his wallet,’ Alistair told her. ‘There was a passport in the cockpit cabin.’
‘What did that tell you?’
‘His name’s Jake Condor. Thirty-eight years old. Australian. He hasn’t got anyone listed as a dependant. His occupation is listed as pilot. The police have enquiries out now, trying to find where he fits. But one thing we do know—according to his passport he flew in from Thailand yesterday morning on a commercial flight. He landed in Cairns. Then he must have picked up the light plane—which is a hire plane, by the way—and come on here. With a detour. His flight plan logged at Cairns airport shows he flew north almost to Cape Tribulation and then came west, but his flying time suggests he stopped somewhere on the way. Then he flew until he crashed.’
She frowned. It wasn’t making much sense. It was a jigsaw with pieces scattered and pieces missing. That was how it always was at the beginning of a case, she thought, and often—too often for comfort—those missing pieces were never found. Especially when she was called in late. And here it was twenty-four hours after the event.
‘Is it too late to take me out to the plane tonight?’ she asked, without much hope. Her fears were confirmed.
‘Yes,’ he said flatly. ‘It’s rough country out there, and the last section has to be done on foot. We can’t go by sea because the reefs around there are too treacherous to beach a boat. That’s why the fishing crew who saw the plane crash couldn’t get near it to help. Rescuers had to make the trek overland and it’s about a mile of rough country. We have people out there now, looking still, but they’ll give up at nightfall. It’s just too dangerous.’
‘But there’s definitely blood in the back of the plane—and the pilot was in the front?’
‘Yes.’
‘You didn’t think to take samples?’
There was a momentary silence and Alistair’s knuckles on the steering wheel tightened. Whoa… She was going to have to tread softly here.
‘No,’ he said at last. ‘I didn’t. I went with the searchers, saw the pilot was dead and the rest were missing, then got a call to say one of my old fishermen patients was having a heart attack back here. So I came back with the body. Without thinking about blood samples.’
‘Alistair, you’re a family doctor,’ Sarah said, her voice softening a little. ‘No one’s expecting you to be a pathologist.’
‘Yeah, but I should have thought…’
‘Are you completely on your own here?’
‘Yes.’
‘How do you cope?’
‘As you can see,’ he said grimly. ‘I don’t very well. I don’t think of blood samples.’
‘Maybe if I was having a heart attack I’d want my doctor to focus on that rather than blood samples myself,’ Sarah admitted. ‘And there’s still time to analyse them. Can we get them tonight? The searchers out there…do you think there’s anything that can be brought in with blood traces on it?’
‘There might be.’ Alistair still sounded tense, but at least he was moving on. He glanced at the clock on the dashboard. ‘If I radio now I’ll catch the search team before they call the search off for the night. But it’ll be a couple of hours before they’re back in town.’
‘Then I’ll look at the pilot first,’ she said. ‘And—given the fact that we might have serious injuries on our hands and missing people—let’s do it now.’
Dolphin Cove Hospital was lovely. The tiny settlement had grown wealthy from pearl fishing in the previous century, and the pearl fishers had looked after their own. They’d endowed a fantastic little hospital that was envied all round the country—by those who knew about it.
In truth, no one much knew about it. Sarah gazed in astonishment at the wide verandas, with windows looking out through the palms to the beach beyond. She hadn’t known this place existed.
‘So this is why you came,’ she whispered, staring around her with increasing delight. The sun was hanging on the horizon, a crimson ball casting a soft pink tinge over the whitewashed hospital. Every window in the place was wide open, and soft white curtains fluttered outward in the breeze. Dinner was being served on the verandas—all mobile patients were outside eating their meal while they watched the sun set over the harbour.
It was truly spectacular. The land between the hospital and the sea was a mass of palm trees, with coconuts hanging in enticing bunches. Closer to the building were frangipani, their creamy yellow flowers spreading a perfume that could be smelled from where she stood.
Out on the water there were pelicans flying low—sweeping in to land, then paddling back and forth in elegant sail-pasts, for all the world like organised flotillas of luxury liners. There were currawongs carolling in the jacarandas overhead, and a host of brilliant lorikeets were stripping a brilliant scarlet bougainvillea.
It was…magic.
‘How long have you been here?’ she whispered, her face reflecting her delight.
‘Five years.’ The set look on Alistair’s face should have stopped her right there, but minding her own business had never been Sarah’s strong point. Heaven knew, she’d intended to stay impersonal, but before she could stop herself the question was out.
‘Since your mother died?’
Whoa. Wrong thing to say. It meant all sorts of things. It told Alistair that Sarah had kept tabs—knew what had happened to the old couple after they’d buried their son. Old Doug Benn had suffered a massive stroke only three weeks after Grant died. He’d died almost immediately, and his wife had simply faded until her death twelve months later.
‘As you say.’ Alistair’s anger was palpable. He climbed from the Land Cruiser and she could see it was all he could do not to slam the door. ‘The local policeman—Barry—is out with the searchers. I’ll introduce you to him later. Meanwhile can I show you to your quarters? Do you want dinner?’
‘I want to see the pilot first,’ she told him. ‘I’m here because this case is urgent. Let’s treat it like that.’
‘Fine by me.’
The morgue was at the rear of the hospital, but even the morgue wasn’t an unpleasant place to be. The high windows were open and the sound of the sea pervaded—the wash of surf from around the headland. Smells in morgues were unmistakeable and unavoidable, but the salt air was giving the antiseptic, clinical morgue atmosphere a run for its money.
‘Do you want to change your clothes?’ Alistair asked shortly, and Sarah shook her head.
‘Let me see him first. Then I’ll put on overalls.’
‘Fine.’ They were being scrupulously polite. Alistair cast her a glance that said he still didn’t really believe she was a pathologist, but he walked forward and pulled out the drawer containing the body.
Sarah didn’t move. She’d learned not to.
Her first task was to stand back and get an overall impression. Things were easier that way. If you glanced at someone you got an initial impression that might be superseded later by close examining. But often that impression was right. Age. Background. Where he’d fitted into life.
Jake Condor, his passport said. Aged thirty-eight. That fitted. He looked thirty-eight.
He looked like a schmuck.
He was a pilot, but he didn’t look anything like the pilot she’d just flown with on the way here. He was dressed in blue jeans, with elastic-sided boots that shone with almost astonishing brightness. His jeans were of the far-too-tight variety—designed for maximum impact on the opposite sex. Jeans like that never had the desired effect, Sarah thought, but she knew plenty of guys who wore them. They were the sort of guy who’d try to pick you up and react with total disbelief when turned down.
It was a lot to extrapolate from one pair of jeans, but Sarah was accustomed to forming impressions fast. Sometimes those impressions helped.
What else? A T-shirt with a slogan on it for some Thai beer. Interesting. That T-shirt had definitely come from overseas and it looked new. It fitted with what she’d been told.
The man had tattoos running down arms that were a bit too thin. His arms had been brawny when the tattoos had been applied, she thought. That dragon had definitely shrunk.
He was wearing a Rolex watch. Real? Maybe.
He was wearing something else that caught her attention. She walked around the table to see the leather pouch attached to his belt and glanced back at Alistair. ‘It looks like a gun holster. Was there a gun?’
‘No. We looked. When we saw the holster Barry did a thorough search of the plane, but there was nothing.’
‘You did check the body for bullet holes?’
‘We checked,’ he said wryly. ‘It seemed sensible.’
She nodded, moving on. The man was clean-shaven. Deeply tanned. A bit…oily, she thought. She walked forward and sniffed and was rewarded by the scent of cheap after-shave.
And his hair… His hair was horrid. It was long, black, and curling in oily strands to his shoulders. It looked as if it had been hauled back in a too tight ponytail and then released. Maybe that had happened in the accident?
His hairline was receding. Balding with a ponytail. Not Sarah’s favourite look.
‘He looks like a right Casanova,’ Alistair said, and she glanced up at him again, surprised in a way that he was still here. Work had the capacity to block out all else. It had always been that way and was her saving grace.
A right Casanova. Yeah. ‘You have that impression, too?’
‘He looks a type.’
‘We learn not to make judgements,’ she said, in a voice that was too prim, and she surprised a smile out of him.
‘I thought your job was all about judgements.’
‘In the face of evidence.’ She moved so she could see the man’s face from both sides. ‘That bump didn’t kill him.’
‘I wouldn’t have thought so. He looks like he’s got a broken nose. The guys who reached the plane first wiped him off, trying to see if there was any sign of life, but it’s bled.’
She glanced down at the T-shirt and nodded. The beer slogan was spattered. Okay. He’d been hit on the nose in the crash and then he bled. It meant that he’d still been alive when the plane hit. She looked more closely at the nose. Surely after a bump like that it should have bled more?
It wouldn’t have bled if the heart had stopped pumping. Death must have been fast.
‘Mmm.’ She wasn’t moving him—still simply looking. ‘Is there any damage to the back of his head?’
‘Not that I can see. I had a good look when we put him on the stretcher to bring him in.’
