Vanished by James Delargy (free novel 24 TXT) 📕

Lorcan called her puppy-dog eyes, an expression that was hard to conjure up under the circumstances. If he said no, she was likely to resist and go anyway. But Ian had shown that he was not someone to be messed with.

109

Naiyana

She made for the house. Ian had parked his ute a little further up the road out of sight. She spoke to him in a whisper.

‘I’ll tell him what’s going on.’

‘No,’ said Ian. ‘You can’t—’

‘Not the truth obviously. A cover story. To keep him calm.’

Ian twisted his lips tight and glanced towards his truck. She understood his trepidation. He wanted to get rid of the bodies immediately. But she had to see her son. He was the only thing that mattered right now.

She tried the door. It was forced shut. She called out for Lorcan and Dylan. It was her husband who came to the door and opened it, kicking a large iron pulley away from it.

He looked stressed, his face drawn. He was shaking.

‘What’s that for?’ she asked, nodding towards the pulley.

‘I thought it would make a good doorstop. An antique.’

She supposed it did. A tripping hazard too but she let that go. She was more anxious to see Dylan. But he wasn’t at the door, buzzing around or running into her arms. She held her breath.

‘Where’s Dylan?’

Lorcan nodded back over his shoulder. ‘Asleep. He was chasing around after the bike all morning. He’s exhausted. Me too.’

She considered going to check on her son but if he was asleep that was good. It was better than coping with this mess.

‘When did you get back in?’ asked Ian, in the background. There was distrust in his voice.

Lorcan shrugged his shoulders. ‘An hour, hour and a half ago.’

‘Why are the tyres on the bike slashed?’

Confusion crossed her husband’s face. ‘Slashed? I don’t know. I nearly totalled it earlier at the crossroads. I abandoned it after that. It’s left me a little…’ He held his hand up to show how it was shaking.

‘You didn’t see any gold? Didn’t try and take any?’ asked Ian.

Lorcan reared back in the doorway as if he’d been punched by an invisible fist. ‘Take the gold? I assumed you had it. To sell it. That’s where you were, right?’

Naiyana flashed a panicked look at Ian. His lips grew thin, nodding deliberately in reply.

‘I’m going back to lie down,’ said Lorcan, squeezing his eyes shut as if in pain.

‘You do that,’ said Naiyana. ‘I have to go to town to get something.’

She didn’t elaborate on it and Lorcan didn’t ask her to elaborate, giving a tired sigh and turning from the doorway as they left. It was every man for himself now and they all knew it.

110

Naiyana

She followed Ian across the back roads west of Hurton and up a dirt road she didn’t know and didn’t trust. He quickly left her behind, with only the blossoming dust cloud in front for directions.

She found him parked off the road, the rusted old Ford facing what looked like a deep gorge beyond. He was liberally dousing the inside of the cab with a jerrycan full of what she assumed was petrol. She could make out two heads propped up in the front seats ready to make their final trip.

‘What took so long?’ he asked, exertion making his T-shirt stick to his muscled body.

‘I was being careful,’ she responded, glaring at him.

‘Good. We need that.’

She watched as he wiped down the surfaces with a cloth before striking a match. A whoosh of orange flame danced behind the glass screen, smoke beginning to eke out of a crack in the window as Mike and Stevie started to burn. She wanted to be long gone before the smell reached them.

Moving to the rear of the ute, Ian put his shoulder to it and pushed, the Ford inching slowly towards the edge, his feet planted in the sand. The front tyres reached the drop and in a flash the vehicle disappeared out of sight with a scream of metal and the crack of bushes being torn apart.

Ian tiptoed back to her, sweeping his tracks behind him with a branch, and got in.

‘I’ve even buckled them in for safety,’ he chuckled.

She wasn’t in the mood to joke. All she wanted was to get away. Turning the car sharply across a nearby patch of hard-packed gibber plains, she headed back towards the road.

As she drove a slew of emotions overwhelmed her. Fear at what Ian had done, of what he might do to her and her family, regret at leaving Perth, at pushing things too far with BS Foods and Chester Grant, and disgust at where she now found herself. Only her love for Dylan and, even scarier, her singular love for Ian, fought against this. She knew why she was attracted to Ian. They were the same. She had come to realize that. Even now. He might be capable of more extreme acts to get what he wanted but she understood it. The need to win.

‘We have to leave,’ said Ian, as they scythed off the dirt road with a jolt and joined the once-paved road to Kallayee. ‘Pack up the gold we have and run. I’ve copies of their security-box keys so I can get their cash too.’

‘We can make it work,’ she countered, scared of how fast things were moving. They were like the truck now, the front tyres over the edge and barrelling out of control.

‘Not here.’

‘But I didn’t kill them,’ said Naiyana, immediately realizing that it was a stupid thing to say to a man who had just executed someone in front of her in cold blood.

111

Emmaline

By the time Emmaline reached Wisbech, her team had completed the search.

The Stay-Here motel on the outskirts of Wisbech was a flat-topped, two-storey block ringed in concrete pillars that hadn’t been erected but left on the ground, partly hidden now by bushes and ready to rip the axle off some unsuspecting vehicle.

‘We found