‘You really have nothing else to say for yourself, soldier? Nothing in mitigation?’
‘Nah,’ Pawcett shook his head. ‘I mean it, Sarge, I’ve had it up to here. I’ve got nothing to say, not tonight, not tomorrow.’
‘In that case you’d better return to the Transport Office.’
Bix watched from the steps as Pawcett made his way to join the others, kicking at the asphalt as he went. There was something not right with that young man, but he was damned if he knew what it was. Maurice Sanders, on the other hand, was a far easier nut to crack. His was a love story and Sergeant Bix knew enough about young servicemen to know they would always want to be thought the shining knight in matters of love, no matter how dubious their actions.
Yes, Sanders had been carrying on with Rosie Farquharson, but it wasn’t the real thing at all. He had the grace to look a little shame-faced when he admitted he’d only been stepping out with Rosamund as a way to distract himself from Sukie Johnson. They’d started an affair before the war when Sanders had been a casual labourer for one of the local farmers. Sukie Johnson was a married woman and ten years older, so they had sensibly broken it off when he’d gone away to war, vowing not to write or see each other, vowing never to be tempted again.
‘Then stone the crows, but the flamin’ army only went and sent me here to recuperate.’
Sanders’s face suggested that he thought there had been some mystical significance to the convalescent hospital being quite so close to the woman to whom he had given his youthful heart. Even Rosamund’s rather obvious charms had been unable to distract him for long and then Sukie had confided a secret in Sanders, one she’d never before told anyone.
‘Her old man knocks her about, Sarge. He hits her. No one knows.’
‘Not even her brother?’
‘Nah, Snow Johnson’s too smart for that. He smacks her where the bruises won’t show.’
Bix swore then and Sanders took Bix’s curse as a cue to go on.
‘That’s what decided me, I’ve got to get her out of there. I figured I needed to get some money together and fast. That’s why we’ve been running a book, me and the lads. I know it’s against the rules, but the only reason was to get a bit of a kitty going. Brayling needs a starter for him and his Ngaire, especially now the baby’s due any day and I wanted to help Sukie get away to her cousins up in the Wairarapa. She’ll be safe there, she can get divorced after the war and we’ll be sweet.’
‘And Pawcett?’
‘Bob wasn’t fussed about the money, he was just bored, so he volunteered to do the runs. I collected the numbers, Cuth looked after the money, and Bob took the whole lot along the tunnel and through to the pub, a few times a week. He did it through Sukie’s brother Duncan. Duncan’d lay the bets when he went into town, collect whatever winnings came in, take his own cut and pass the rest back to Bob. I sorted our cut—’
‘Two cuts taken before the winnings got back to those who’d put the money up front?’
Sanders frowned, flicking back the wild curl that had fallen over his forehead, ‘Fair do’s, Sir, we were the ones taking the risk. I’d divvy up the rest, depending on who’d won what. Tidy.’
Bix shook his head, a tidy mess, and now he knew all about it he had to decide how far up the line of command to share the story of the soldiers’ transgressions, ‘Tidy for you, if not for those financing your little operation.’
‘Ah, they were in it for the fun as much as the money.’
‘That’s enough excuses, Private, let’s get you back to the others.’
Private Sanders stood up and followed Bix into the yard, his hands in his pockets, a deep frown cutting across his forehead, ‘I do love Sukie, you know, she’s a bloody good woman, nothing like the rest of them.’
‘The rest of them?’
‘Her old man, her brother. There wasn’t anyone else who could lay the bets for us, so it had to be them. I’d thought about doing some work with the pair of them, after the war, but once Sukie told me about Snow, I couldn’t even look at him without wanting to knock him out. And then I got to know Duncan better and well, let’s just say that if I’d any choice in the matter, I’d have nothing to do with him.’
‘How come?’
‘He’s always on about how the war’s got nothing to do with us way down here in New Zealand, you know? Reckons we’re all daft buggers for joining up, bangs on about how our dads charged off to the first war and what good did it do any of us. Sounds like a Commie half the time.’
‘A Commie?’ Bix asked, alert.
‘Now look, I’m not saying he is one, Sarge, it’s just the way they talk, you know, all that blather about how you can’t trust the government, can’t believe a thing you hear on the news. He’s all mouth is Duncan, but most of all he thinks he’s the golden boy for staying well out of it.’
‘He said that to you, directly to your face?’
‘No, Sir, not to me, I reckon even an oaf like Duncan Blaikie would know I’d smack him one if he said that to me. He said it to Bob Pawcett. Sometimes I think he almost persuaded Bob he was right, you know? That the war wasn’t worth it after all.’
‘He sounds like a right piece of work.’
Sanders shrugged, ‘Between her brother and her old man, Sukie’s had a rough time of it. I know I’ve mucked up, but honest, I just couldn’t see myself clearing out of here back off to Gawd knows where and not making a bit of an effort to look after her.’
They were at the door of the Transport Office and Sanders turned to his superior, ‘Can I ask you something, Sarge?’
‘Go ahead.’
‘We can’t think like that, can we? That it’s all for nothing, we’re just being used by the brass, the politicians and their mob, to get what they want. We can’t believe they don’t really care, can we, Sir?’
Bix shook his head, ‘No we can’t, Private. There’s nothing ends a war faster than lack of morale. Too bloody right we can’t think like that.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Alleyn and Corporal Brayling had come to the end of the hospital yard when Brayling halted before a profusion of roses. The Inspector knew that during the day their sumptuous blooms belied their own vicious thorns and those of the barbed wire on which they grew. To their right was the staff entrance from the parking area, to their left, the last of the wards, Military 3, where the most damaged and dangerously ill of the soldiers lay, many of them no doubt awake in pain or fear.
Brayling turned to Alleyn, his finger to his lips as he slowly edged backwards through what Alleyn now saw to be a carefully disguised gap in the fence of roses. Following Brayling’s guide, his head and shoulders bent low to avoid the line of brutal wire at head level, Alleyn passed through the barrier. They walked on and in less than a few hundred yards the meticulously tended hospital grounds were deftly swallowed in dense native bush. Alleyn noted again the peculiarly specific scent of the New Zealand bush, deep and loamy, a heady sense of rich damp earth even in midsummer. As the over-heated asphalt of the yard gave way to the ancient land, the air seemed brighter, the sky higher and the fantastic array of stars sharper still, tiny beams of starlight picking tracks through the bush as it closed in above them. The detective put out a hand to halt his guide and turned off his torch, Brayling followed suit. They stood together, looking up through the gathering canopy of leaves and fronds.
‘You know, Brayling, the first time I saw your New Zealand night sky, I found it almost disturbing, the constellations turned about, the Milky Way rich and full, stretching over us, as if it were the roof beam, holding us up.’
‘I could tell you about roof beams, Sir, the ones in our meeting houses hold us up, hold up the story of our people.’
‘I’ve heard that and on any other day, Brayling, I should like to hear more, but not tonight, I’m afraid. I ought not to have stopped you.’
‘We’re almost there, Sir.’
Alleyn followed Brayling, pace for pace. Within another hundred yards the ground b
eneath them began to change. As Brayling quietly spoke a warning, Alleyn noticed the earth first become harder and then sharper, there was rock rather than soil beneath his shoes. Next came a slope downwards, gentle at first and then a steep incline that caused Alleyn to reach out to steady himself, grasping at the scrubby mānuka bushes lining the path into the cave itself. In the semi-darkness, their way marked only by the torchlights ahead of them, Alleyn entertained a brief idea of the descent into Hades, the Māori soldier his guide. Even as he brushed away the fleeting image, he felt a shiver, noting that the air around them was noticeably cooler. His own breath as well as his guide’s sounded closer, as if the foothills had closed in. He felt his heart quicken and shook away his symptoms in frustration. He had been waiting for this moment all night, if his suspicions were right, a breakthrough was just ahead, now was not the time to allow flights of fancy, no matter how carefully Brayling was treading or how much quieter his lowered voice.
‘This is where the cave opens out, the tomo is further in, beyond a ledge. We’ll have to go round a few pools of water, they’ll be deeper since the storm. The ledge itself is like a false wall, so watch out when you get inside, be careful if you climb on it.’
Brayling then took a careful step back, leaving the path ahead clear for Alleyn.
‘You’re not coming with me?’
The soldier frowned and his voice was gruff, ‘Not if I don’t have to, Sir. The thing is, you see, my people—well, I don’t reckon they’d thank me for bringing you here.’
‘Not even for a situation such as this and after the events of tonight? You owe me, you know, Brayling.’
‘I do, Sir, and I think I could make them understand that part of it, but I’d have to tell how I’ve been meeting Ngaire here and then I’d be in even more trouble, breaking hospital rules, bringing her into it, as well as showing you round. I reckon they’d go crook at me, all right.’
‘Whereas, if you don’t escort me in, show me the cave, you don’t have to admit that you brought me here?’
‘Nah, that’d be like lying. I’ll tell them the truth, but if I can say I wasn’t the one to show it all to you, if I can say you saw it for yourself, well, they might go a bit easier on me, if you see what I mean.’
‘I think I do. You’re in enough trouble with the army already, you don’t need to be in trouble at home as well?’
‘Something like that. You go ahead and I’ll follow up.’
The young soldier waited as the detective from Scotland Yard took his first steps into the wide underground space, all the while hoping his trust wasn’t about to get him a nasty smack on the back of the head.
What actually hit Alleyn was the shock of the place in which he now found himself. This wasn’t his first visit to this astonishing country and Alleyn knew he hadn’t seen anywhere near all of the bewildering glories that New Zealand’s elemental landscape was rightly famed for, but the cave was something else entirely. He slowly shone the torch around, moving from right to left, up and down, all the while grasping for adjectives that were less idiotic than ‘stupendous’ or ‘astounding’ or ‘grand’. He failed precisely because everything he saw was far more than stupendous, astounding and grand. The height of the rock as it soared above and its vaulted shape gave the cave the feel of a cathedral, deep in the earth. He stood on the edge of a rock floor that formed a roughly circular bowl, wide and low, and the floor sloped gently into an area where his torch now illuminated a series of shallow pools. As Brayling had suggested, the pools were no doubt fed by the evening’s storm, separated from one another by narrow channels of rock, some of the channels still wet from the flooding earlier that night. His torchlight on the walls showed narrow runnels of water, some beginning to dry, others trickling into the pools. Where the beam hit the water, reflections bounced back and off, refracting light around the cave. In places the walls were as smooth as glass, perhaps from the years of flood water that had helped to form this phenomenon, others were jagged, with dark grey rock newly exposed, an uneven tumble of stones and scree on the ground beneath as evidence that no matter how perfectly manufactured the cavern looked, it had been carved, not by the hand of man, but by the earth on which he now stood, an earth which had never felt more living.
Beyond and above the pools Alleyn noted the ledge that Brayling had mentioned. From this distance it looked as if the ledge might be a foot wide, but no more. Looking at it from below, Alleyn felt as if he were sitting in the stalls of a particularly modern play, the set intended to suggest form rather than resemble it. To his left, stage right, the ledge was low, sloping gently upwards. It started perhaps two feet above the ground and by the time it came to stage left at the other side of the cave it had risen a good ten feet above the earth. Alleyn shone the torch on the walls above and behind the ledge. At the lower end the cave wall was solid, but as the ledge climbed, fifteen or twenty paces along, the wall behind appeared to shift backwards, as if wall and ledge separated. This was indeed what Brayling had explained, the horizontal and the vertical rock forced apart by some unseen force, leaving the fathomless chasm or tomo in the gap between the two. Alleyn felt it to be distinctly vertiginous, easily as unnerving as it was impressive.
Brayling must have felt Alleyn’s sense of awe, for he whispered from his position at the cavern entrance, ‘Sir, if you want to see something really special, you ought to turn off the torch. Wait until your eyes get used to the dark and then look up.’
‘You know, don’t you, soldier, that in a particular type of widely-read detective fiction, the instant I turn out the torch is the exact moment that our villain will cuff me over the head, tumble my senseless corpse into the murky pool below and make off with whatever spoils are hidden in this treasure trove?’
‘No idea about that, Sir, I don’t read detective books.’
‘Very wise,’ Alleyn answered brightly. ‘In that case, I am prepared to take my chances.’
Brayling clicked off his torch and Alleyn followed suit, the retort of the soft buttons sounded surprisingly sharp in the silence. He waited a few moments as advised and then lifted his eyes to the rock walls and ceiling above. Slowly, as his eyes became accustomed to the dark, Alleyn began to make out pinpricks of light, first one, then two, then a dozen or more, followed by hundreds, perhaps thousands of small, twinkling lights. It was an underground Milky Way, the constellations all the more breathtaking for their location deep in the belly of the earth, and very alive.
‘What are they? Glow-worms?’
Alleyn heard his own voice, a whisper, full of both awe and care for the delicacy of the creatures, the startling clarity of their myriad lights through the darkness.
‘That’s it, pūrātoke.’ Brayling answered, coming closer.
‘Is this what your people don’t want others to see?’
‘Have you ever been up north, Sir?’
‘Yes, before the war,’ Alleyn had chosen to trust Brayling to get him to the cave, but he was still aware of the need for care in his speech, this was no time to be broadcasting his movements about New Zealand to all and sundry.
‘I don’t know if you had much time for looking around, but you must’ve seen what happens when businessmen get their hands on things.’
‘I have certainly seen the confusion it can cause and not just in New Zealand. There are those in my own dear mother’s village who would happily build a wider road here, allow more commerce there.’
‘Too many of our own fullas like that as well,’ Brayling said darkly.
‘And while it is perfectly understandable that a living needs to be made, one does sometimes wonder.’
‘At the expense of what, eh, Sir?’
‘Exactly, Brayling, at what expense indeed.’
Alleyn was aware of his status as a symbol of both the crown and the authority that brought the white man’s understanding of property to these islands, land as a commodity rather than the living entity as explained by his friend Dr Te Pokiha. Roderick Alleyn and his brother
had had it bred into them that man is but the custodian of the land, keeping it whole and good for future generations, a belief sorely tried when the brothers saw action in the Great War and tried again now. He frowned and shook his head, he was lapsing into the melodramatic, something the grandeur of New Zealand’s scenery did to him on occasion. He took one more look. He would relate the scene to Troy in his next letter, she would want him to describe exactly the tones of black in the rich darkness spanning above them, the tiny twinkling lights in the cave walls and their echo in the water, encompassing in their glowing spectrum both the brilliant white of the brightest stars and the soft gold of a pale winter sun. He would no doubt fail in the attempt, but he would try anyway.
The two men stood peacefully side by side for a second more, and then Alleyn took an uncertain breath, he hated the idea of hunches but in that instant he felt something was not right, something uncanny. Brayling too, tensed beside him.
The Māori man edged ever so slightly closer and Alleyn heard the faintest whisper, ‘There’s someone here.’
Alleyn nodded and hoped that the pale light from the glow-worms was enough for Brayling to see the discreetmovement of his head. Both men looked slowly to their left, to the darkest recess of the cave where the ledge was at its lowest. It was a spot Alleyn had noted when he tried to imprint the vision on his mind’s eye for Troy. It seemed to have fewer of the little lights, presumably this was the point where the cave joined the tunnel leading beneath the hospital and on to the Bridge Hotel.
‘Ready?’ he whispered to Brayling.
‘Āe,’ the soldier replied in his own language and Alleyn felt rather than saw his companion prepare himself for action, his body tense, his legs ready to run or to leap.
Alleyn aimed the torch and clicked the switch, the cave was immediately illuminated in a fierce beam that decimated the primordial splendour of the preceding minutes, revealing brutally sharp rock and horribly deep crevices. Directly across from them, less than fifty paces distant, they saw a flash of cold white, which disappeared as someone leapt away and was gone, apparently swallowed into the earth itself.