tell me a lot. Simple things like a chest X-ray and an echocardiogram. You don’t have to go all the way to Christchurch or anything. Just down to Greymouth.’
Jack shook his head decisively. ‘I’ve told you, Fliss. Just what I’ve told all the other doctors that have come and gone in these parts. I haven’t crossed the river since I retired and I’ve got no intention of crossing it now. I’m eighty-six. Nobody lives for ever and when I pop my clogs I intend to do it in the privacy of my own home. Or maybe down at the Hog.’
Fliss sighed. ‘Fair enough.’
That the local pub qualified as a second home made her smile. The old stone building near the general store that Mrs McKay ran was far more of a social hub than the pretty church or the memorial hall opposite the doctor’s surgery, but Fliss didn’t mind. She liked being at the end of the quietest street with plenty of time to soak in the peace and quiet in the hope of unravelling the tangled knots in her head and heart.
Pulling a tourniquet and the items she needed to take a blood sample from her bag, Fliss kept a straight face.
‘Which arm today, then?’ she queried.
Jack pursed his lips thoughtfully. ‘Make it the right one,’ he said finally.
The look they shared acknowledged the joke that had forged the bond Fliss had formed so quickly with the very first patient she had treated in Morriston. The query of which arm the patient preferred to have the sample taken from was automatic and it had popped out on that very first consultation, probably due to Fliss being still unsettled.
The fact that Jack only had one arm, thanks to the fishing mishap that had forced his retirement nearly thirty years ago, had made the question a potential insult, but the old man had given it due consideration to save Fliss’s tongue-tied embarrassment and it was thanks to him that she had suddenly felt at home. Even the disturbing reminder of what she’d left behind that came with the Scottish lilt she could hear in her patient’s voice could be dealt with. She was in exactly the right place at the right time in her life.
As she tightened the tourniquet and smiled at the memory, Fliss finally shook off that sense of unease and felt herself relax. She would finish this home visit in a few minutes and then hurry back to her surgery where she knew Maria was probably waiting—amongst others. Convinced that her fifth child was going to put in an early appearance, Maria was attending the evening surgery a couple of times a week now for reassurance, while her husband and children did the evening chores on their rather isolated farmlet.
It was then, in that moment of relaxation, that they heard it.
A sharp crack. Loud enough to make the loose glass pane in one of Jack’s doors to rattle just a little. Unexpected enough to make Fliss jump and drop the needle she was about to fit to the end of her ten-ml syringe.
‘Just as well you weren’t about to stick that into me,’ Jack muttered.
‘Yeah.’ The agreement was wholehearted. ‘What on earth was that? It sounded like a gun.’ Fliss knew her shudder was probably visible. ‘I hate guns.’
And anything to do with them. Like the danger they represented.
And the way they automatically made her think of Angus.
‘Probably a car backfiring,’ Jack said casually.
‘Hmm.’ Fliss reached into her kit for a fresh needle. An unlikely explanation. Her car might be parked out on the dusty street but that was because she could be needed in a hurry somewhere else. As a rule, people didn’t bother driving cars on this side of the bridge. Once in the village they could easily walk where they needed to go. Or ride bicycles.
‘More likely it’s those Johnston boys.’ Jack was watching Fliss as she ripped open an alcohol swab. ‘Guy Fawkes is only a week or so away. They’re probably having a test run of their crackers.’
Fliss glanced outside again to where the young Johnston twins had been riding their bikes. Sure enough, two bicycles lay abandoned in the middle of the street, one with its front wheel still spinning slowly. Under one end of the long macrocarpa hedge that bordered the Treffers’ property, a pair of short legs could be seen protruding. A small boy hiding, perhaps—avoiding the potential consequences of an illicit act.
The second crack was even louder.
‘Now, that did sound like a gun,’ Jack said. ‘Maybe Darren’s doing something stupid in his back yard.’
It was quite possible. Darren was a local resident who shot possums in the vast tracts of native bush that cut Morriston off from the Southern Alps. As one of New Zealand’s most destructive pests, the culling was commendable but the way Darren left the carcasses piled in his driveway awaiting his taxidermy skills before being sent to the tourist shops was fairly unpopular with his neighbours.
‘Mind you,’ Jack added when a series of cracks made the windows as well as the doors rattle, ‘that’s no shotgun he’s using.’
Fliss unsnapped the tourniquet as Jack stood up. There was no way she could concentrate on taking a blood sample until they discovered the cause of this disturbing interruption.
They both moved to the glass doors.
‘Look!’ Fliss point towards the river mouth. ‘The whitebaiters are coming in in a hurry.’
Jack picked up a pair of binoculars from the end of his kitchen bench with an ease that suggested it was an automatic gesture. ‘It’s those Barrett boys,’ he told Fliss.
The fact that the Barrett ‘boys’ were both well into their fifties failed to raise a smile. She knew the brothers lived well out of the village, worked sporadically at a sawmill down the coast and relied heavily on the whitebait season to supplement their income. Right now, they were wading ashore with a speed that was at complete odds with the impression of laziness Fliss had gained on the one occasion she had met them.
The speed was enough to see one of them stumble and sprawl headlong into the slow-moving water.
‘Why have they left their nets behind?’
Jack didn’t answer the question. The way his grip on the binoculars tightened was enough to make Fliss catch her breath and it wasn’t just Jack’s sudden focus that brought those hairs up again on the back of her neck.
Her eyesight was more than good enough to see that the man who had stumbled wasn’t getting up again.
He was floating, face down in the water, while his brother continued his dash to the shore.
‘Jack?’ The tone was urgent and Fliss took the binoculars that he handed over in stunned silence.
Now Fliss could see something she would never have seen with the naked eye. Something she had not wanted to see.
A dark stain in the water to one side of the floating figure. Quickly dispersed, of course, only to re-form.
‘Oh, my God,’ Fliss breathed. ‘He’s been shot, hasn’t he, Jack?’
‘Come away from the window.’ Jack took Fliss’s elbow in a firm grip and propelled her back into the kitchen, but not before she took a wild visual sweep of the view closer to hand.
The
