Wake by Elizabeth Knox Page B

the All-Father woke up. He partly opened his wide green wings and dropped down onto the lip of the trough. He landed clumsily, but not hard, his weight incommensurate with his bulk. He sidled back and forth along the trough as Belle lifted the hopper’s lid and shook the feed into it. Now and then the bird opened his hooked beak and nipped Belle’s vest. ‘Watch it,’ Belle said to him. The kakapo made a few deep rattling remarks in reply, then put his whiskery face down into the pellets. Belle rested one hand lightly on his back for a moment. Jacob would have liked to do that too; the bird’s feathers looked thick, springy, and alive.
    They went back down the hill. Belle returned the sack of feed to the shed.
    â€˜Have you got plenty?’ Jacob asked as she was locking up.
    â€˜Yes. Why?’
    Jacob didn’t answer, but she read his expression. ‘Are we really stuck?’
    â€˜I don’t know. But if anyone could come in they would have by now.’
    â€˜We’re not supposed to think too far ahead,’ Sam said. ‘We’re only supposed to help Mrs McNeal and her daughter.’
    Belle straddled her quad bike. ‘Who wants to ride and who want to follow?’
    There was a way up through the meadow and along one edge of the old arboretum, the collection of exotic trees planted by Richard Stanislaw, a nineteenth-century runholder whose twelve-bedroom homestead formed the core of the spa. There were times when the going was steep, especially on the trip back down, when Jacob and Sam waded through ferns while holding Kate steady on the back of the bike. Kate rode side-saddle—the only position her hips could manage. Holly scrambled after them. Holly was near collapse when they finally reached the spa in the early afternoon—scratched, bleeding, trembling with exhaustion, less from the walk than the effort of suppressing her anxiety since noon the day before. Jacob carried Kate into the spa past the sheeted shapes that lay in a row on its terrace. He put her down in one of the armchairs in the double-height glass atrium.
    When William and Bub arrived at the spa they went from room to room checking for signs of life. They found three yellowed, pitted corpses in the greasy-walled sauna. And two more in one of the treatment rooms, one whose head was a pomander pierced by a dozen scissors and nail files, the other with her face encased in plastic wrap—its box still clutched in her cyanotic hands. They found the manager in his office, dead on his feet, with the top of his smashed skull pressed into a bull’s-eye of blood on his office wall.
    It was in the manager’s office that William picked up a ruled pad and began to make notes. He wrote down where each victim was found, how he thought they’d died, and who they were—easy in the case of the staff, who were wearing name tags.
    Bub asked William, ‘How can you be so clinical?’ And William replied that this wasn’t his first dwelling full of dead people.
    After they’d been at the Spa about forty minutes, Warren turned up with Dan and Oscar.
    As soon as they came into the lobby Dan spotted the smears of blood on the floor. He grabbed Oscar and turned the boy towards him. Dan was a dad himself—though of younger children—and it was his instinct to press Oscar’s face into his chest, to enfold and blind him. But Oscar was so tall that Dan was only able to set his hands against the boy’s temples. He made blinkers. ‘Don’t look,’ he said.
    Oscar stayed obediently still, eyes wide and nostrils flaring.
    William came out of the manager’s office. ‘The Business Centre is uncontaminated.’ He pointed the way.
    Dan was impressed and rather reassured by the man’s use of ‘uncontaminated’. It made him sound like he’d found himself in similar situations before—crime scenes perhaps, Dan thought. Warren had talked about a police