Chapter 29 Miles
Miles
Miles watches from his window as Elis crosses the street towards the bus.
Elis hesitates and appears to shake his head before boarding.
Polly and George follow, a few minutes later.
For Miles, it’s his cue to leave – everyone is now on the bus but him.
He drains his coffee and takes a final look out of the window.
It’s unsociably early and a litter picker is snatching wrappers off the pavement in the half-light.
The sun has risen beyond the mountains to the left, but a mixture of cloud and fog has muted the dawn.
Not everyone was keen to leave this early, but Miles insisted on it – the sooner they hit the road, the better.
The others haven’t been told exactly where they’re going – only that their first destination is the West Coast. Reubyn thought it would make sense to explain it on the way, or not at all, in case anyone challenged the idea.
As for Miles, he only has two rules, which he’s written in their WhatsApp group.
Rule number one: no one is to mention the Caira Kennedy case to the girls until he does.
And rule number two: there are to be no social media posts – especially about the bus, or anything that could identify where they’re going. They must not be followed.
Miles leaves the room and takes the lift to the ground floor. He informs the receptionist that he’s checking out and slides his keycard across the desk.
The receptionist, a mousy man in his thirties, smiles and taps at his keyboard. ‘I hope you enjoyed your stay, Mr Deverill.’
‘I did, very much. Thank you.’
Miles is presented with his bill for room service, which he pays for with a tap of his phone and then turns to leave.
‘Oh, one more thing, sir.’ Miles turns to see the receptionist waving a small, padded envelope in his hand. ‘You have some correspondence.’
‘Thanks.’ Miles accepts it with hesitation and flips it over. Handwritten on the front is his name, followed by the hotel. There’s no postmark. ‘Do you know who left this?’ he asks.
The receptionist gives him a thin-lipped smile – a mixture of politeness and confusion. He shakes his head. ‘Sorry, I don’t have a record of that.’
‘Of course. Thanks very much.’
Miles folds the envelope into his pocket and rolls his luggage across the lobby.
By the time he reaches the exit, the sting of alarm he felt at receiving hand-delivered mail here in New Zealand is already abating.
There’s a perfectly good explanation for it.
At the conclusion of the trial, he received a whole collection of letters from journalists, all grovellingly polite as they tried to convince him to give an interview.
What he has here must be another one – almost certainly from the reporter who accosted him yesterday.
Miles crosses the street towards the motorhome.
A window is open on the vehicle and the patter of conversation leaks out.
As he makes his way around to its far side, he double-glances at the bus’s front, which has the hulking build and intimidating height of a truck cab.
A door is open to a small staircase at the middle, and Miles grabs the steel handrail and ascends.
He’s greeted by the scent of alpine air freshener and a strain of voices: the combined, multi-pitched groan of six people trying to muster their enthusiasm for the man who called them here at this ungodly hour.
‘I saved you a space up front,’ Reubyn hollers from the driver’s seat.
There’s a clunk and hiss as the staircase retracts and the door closes behind him.
Miles tenses his lips to contain his reaction at seeing the interior for the first time.
It’s strange: less like boarding a vehicle and more like walking into a hotel suite – albeit a claustrophobic one.
To his left, the girls are spread across an arrangement of corner benches either side of a bolted-down coffee table.
Everything is slate grey, save for a spatter of mustard-coloured cushions, lamps, and other benign furnishings of the kind you might find in a clinic’s waiting room.
Every inch of wall space is taken up with either windows or cabinets, and there is the sense that a much larger room has been compressed into this one, the air and space drawn out of it.
Beyond the living area, there are four seats in two rows facing the windscreen and control panel.
To Miles’s right is a galley kitchen and, beyond that, a door to another room.
Their luggage is piled up in the kitchen, along with food, pallets of bottled water and newly purchased sleeping bags – all the supplies Reubyn picked up from the shops yesterday. Miles adds his bag to the pile.
Jessie and Faith mirror his smile as he makes his way through the living area, although Polly barely glances up from her laptop. Miles takes the front passenger seat, with Elis and George behind.
Reubyn leans over and whispers: ‘Any update from the cops, overnight?’
‘Nope.’
Reubyn shakes his head as he fiddles with the controls. ‘They’re rubbish aren’t they.’ His tinkering triggers a wiper, and it screeches back and forth over the dry windscreen several times before he figures out how to switch it off. ‘What about your stalker? Anything from them?’
‘No, nothing, thankfully.’ Miles strains his neck to see out of the window. ‘Look, do you mind if we get moving?’
‘Of course.’ Reubyn does a final check in his mirrors, then presses the accelerator and releases the handbrake, and the bus crawls into the road.
Miles shifts in his seat for the first ten minutes of the journey, looking all around for any vehicles that might be following.
He ignores the conversation behind him, which is about sleeping arrangements and is dominated by George’s views on who should have the right to occupy the separate bedroom.
As it’s a Sunday morning, the roads are dead, and Miles is soon satisfied they’re not being tailed.
Roadside buildings quickly get fewer until there are none, and in what seems like no time at all the single carriageway cuts a path through a wild and lonely landscape.
Miles hooks his arm around the headrest and faces backwards. ‘How cool is this?’
He nods enthusiastically at the others, and while his smile is genuine, it’s tempered by guilt.
If Miles was being upfront and honest with Jessie, there would be an open discussion going on about all the messed-up stuff that’s happened.
There would be speculation about the identity of the man who’s been following him.
He would be tearing open the letter that’s in his pocket and showing his friends the latest example of what he’s had to put up with.
Instead, there is a strange atmosphere of false calm mixed with genuine excitement, and it’s left Miles with a numb feeling in his stomach.
‘It’s so cool,’ Jessie replies. ‘Where are we camping tonight?’
‘We’re going to be driving up the West Coast,’ Reubyn says, without taking his eyes off the road. ‘It’s quite remote out there. I’ve found us a good camping spot where we can stay tonight. The weather’s going to be crap for the next day or two, so we just need somewhere to hunker down, really.’
George rolls his eyes. ‘Brilliant. Somewhere to hunker down. I’m glad we travelled halfway across the globe for that.’
‘The more remote, the better, I reckon,’ Elis says. ‘That was always the point of coming somewhere like this – to get away from everyone.’
‘Too bad we can’t get away from you,’ George says, his quip garnering a couple of awkward laughs.
Polly hasn’t engaged in their conversation and instead mutters expletives as she attempts to do something on her laptop.
She’s hotspotting off her phone but the signal is getting increasingly temperamental the further they get from Queenstown.
Elis is equally untalkative, and the chatter in the back fades away.
With no audible distractions, Miles focuses all his attention on the landscape in an attempt to clear his head.
The whole point of this getaway is to allow his mind to switch off from the awful events of the trial and forget about his stalker.
He’s determined to do it. Miles is still convinced he’s in the best place for a mental detox: views as dramatic as these must be able to distract from any thoughts.
He attempts to frame each vista and examine every detail – anything to set his mind on a different track.
They pass a barren vineyard, with rows of twisted remains, and another where vines flourish under black nets.
Then a field with a cluster of stumps where a chainsaw has been taken to a copse.
For hours they drive on, the views changing rapidly.
The highway remains flat but around it the terrain oscillates – up and down, wide and then suddenly narrow.
Mountain ranges tumble into hills, and plains give way to rugged slopes that corner into great gorges.
They pass lakes and pine forests. Fields of grasses that are foreign shades of green and sickly brown.
The road skirts an enormous lake, and, briefly, the sun is out and cuts shards off every inch of the water.
Behind it, mountains are half obscured by heavy cloud.
In the back, Polly has given up on trying to work and has fallen asleep.
Miles’s limbs are increasingly restless, and his fidgeting hand creeps into his pocket, where the envelope is folded.
He pinches at it, squeezing the blistered packaging under the surface.
As he makes his way down, he feels something solid.
The temptation to open the envelope itches away at him, but he knows he must wait until he’s alone if he wants to swerve any unwanted questions.
A new prickle of worry runs through him.
No journalist’s letter he’s ever received has come in a padded envelope.
And if a reporter didn’t hand-deliver this package to his hotel, then there’s an obvious and alarming explanation for who did.