Fifty Fifty (Detective Harriet Blue #2)(50)

‘It mightn’t necessarily have been Snale that they were after.’ Kash shrugged. ‘Maybe it was you or me. Maybe it actually was Zac.’

I lay back against the pillows and watched my partner watching the TV. His mouth was turned down and his eyes were set. He wasn’t his usual self. All the bravado, all the heroic puff had left his voice. He seemed drained. When he spoke, I realised why.

‘I know you spoke to Tenacity,’ he said.





Chapter 73


I SAID NOTHING. My job as a Sex Crimes detective includes working with the utmost discretion at all times. A good majority of the victims I deal with don’t want anyone to know what has happened to them, particularly their families. Confirming or denying that I knew Tenacity at all was completely against the rules. Kash seemed to know, didn’t seem to care. He kept talking, turning the wedding ring on his finger around and around.

‘You must have dealt with her after the assault,’ he said. ‘I know you can’t say anything. She thinks I don’t know. Her mother told me not long after it happened, said Tenacity didn’t want me to know because she thought I’d probably turn it around, make it a part of my obsession. Well, she was right, of course. I just added it to the hatred I was already feeling. It spurred me on. I’d only just come back from a deployment in Afghanistan, and went right back as fast as I could. Stupid. So stupid.’

He stretched and settled in the seat, his long legs splayed before him. The woman on the television screen was dying of joy. She was up to seventy-five thousand dollars.

‘ That night in Kuta, in Bali,’ Kash said. ‘I’d only been out of the bar for about thirty seconds. I walked out to take a phone call from my mum. It was too loud in the bar. I got out the front doors, turned left and went over to stand on the street corner. I felt the pressure wave thump right through the middle of my body. I was actually knocked off my feet by it. I didn’t even hear the bomb blast. I felt like I’d been hit by a car.’

He ran a hand through his hair. I sat watching, seeing him standing on the corner of the moonlit street hung with neon lights. People screaming.

‘And then I look back and the whole place is on fire,’ he said. ‘And people are running out of it. Some of them are burning. Some of them were missing pieces. I was a surfer. I’d never seen anything like that. Not even in the movies. It was like I’d died suddenly and I’d awakened in hell. And I knew right away – whoever had caused this, they were from hell. They had to have been. Because this wasn’t the sort of thing that happened on Earth.’

The woman on the game show was up to a hundred thousand dollars. A heat rash was creeping up her neck and cheeks. She wiped at her eyes, breathless. Kash watched her.

‘From then on, that’s how I saw it,’ he said. ‘I thought there were evil people, demons, walking around on the Earth, plotting to open up the ground and unleash their world on us. I had to fight them. Because if I didn’t fight them, what was the point of it all? I dropped everything. I went after them. I devoted my life. It was like my wife and my job and my family and my friends had never existed. I had a clear mission, with clear enemies, and that was all that mattered. And then last night …’

He seemed to drift away. I waited.

‘Yesterday I was right back where it all started. Feeling the blast. The pressure wave. Staring at the flames.’

‘It’s not …’ I struggled to find the words. ‘That time hasn’t been wasted. You’ve fought a good fight. There’s no way of knowing how many lives you’ve saved through your work.’

‘But I wanted to put a stop to the badness,’ he said. ‘In my mind, it would have all been over by now. There would be an end, and everything I had sacrificed would have been worth it. But badness is everywhere. There’s a little bit of hell on Earth, and you never know when you’re going to see it next.’





Chapter 74


‘TALK TO TENACITY,’ I said. I reached over and grabbed his hand. ‘Call her.’

We watched as the woman on the screen battled her emotions, trying to decide whether to risk her hundred grand for what was hidden inside the last briefcase. She was pulling on her neck, tugging her ears down, the weight of the decision seeming to physically force her downwards. She picked the mystery briefcase. Animated sad clown faces flitted and flashed across the screen as a ten-dollar note was revealed, taped to a board on the inside of the case.

Kash took out his phone and left me watching the woman crying on the screen.

Hell on Earth. I’d seen slivers of that place myself, seen its flames flicker in the eyes of bad men I’d sat across from in the interrogation room, listening to them confess their crimes. I’d seen evil intentions in the eyes of foster fathers who’d welcomed my brother and me into their damp, cluttered homes, television light glaring on the walls, the blank faces of other abandoned children peering from shadowed corners. I understood the realisation Kash had experienced as he stood watching Zac Taby’s body burn in the driver’s seat of Snale’s car, a decade and a half after he’d watched his friends burn among the remains of dozens of others on a terrible night in Kuta. Sometimes, it’s easy to get caught up in this job, to think that you’re getting on top of evil. That in some wonderful distant future there will be no terrorists. No killers. No rapists and fiends. A dream like that is worth sacrificing everything for. Love. Friends. Marriage. Kids. It seems worth the fight.